Tutorial: Upload art to ao3 since tumblr is stupid and changed their policies in dangerous ways
So, obviously it’s bad. Nothing is safe and everything is terrifying. If you are backing up your images and wondering what to do with them now before you find some new site to try like Dreamwidth or Pillowfort, here is a tutorial on how to upload images to some places I’ve tried for hosting images to post to ao3.
The first will be Google Photos. I know a lot of you don’t trust Google, but they have a lot of free storage and it’s crazy easy to use.
First log in to google and navigate to google photos. (URL: https://photos.google.com/)
You will be shown this page:
As you can see, i have two pieces of fanart there from a few years ago. Click the little “Upload” button next to the search bar at the top and select the image you want to upload. I chose a cat I found on google images (don’t worry I deleted it later).
Once it says success, reload the page, and you’ll see this:
Click on your image to see the image page:
And right click on your image to get a drop down menu:
This part is browser dependant. I’m using Google Chrome currently, so it’s “Copy Image Address”. Firefox is something like “Get Image Source” or something along those lines. Any other browser and you’ll need to figure that part out.
Now that you have your image address copied, head over to the AO3 new post page.
Fill in all the settings you want, make sure you get the required ones. Eventually you’ll hit the end of the page and see this big box:
Click the “Rich Text” box to make this easier:
Press the image button I have highlighted on that image, and you’ll get a box:
Paste the address you copied earlier into the “Source” box, and fill out the image description. The image description is only shown if something were to happen to your image to make it not show. It’s helpful for debugging if you have issues with multiple images. The dimensions can be left alone unless you want to specifically size your image (good for images that will be used in fic but not too useful usually if it’s on it’s own) Press OK. You’ll see the image in the box if you did it right, though it might be slightly off color:
Switch back to HTML mode so you can see the changes since the rich text editor can be slightly buggy.
Should look something like that. it’ll likely be <p><img src=“YOUR COPIED IMAGE ADDRESS” alt=“YOUR IMAGE DESCRIPTION” width=“WIDTH” height-=“HEIGHT”/> </p>
Add any finishing touches and then click Preview:
Make sure everything looks right, and the “Post”. If something seems wonky press “Edit” and check it again.
And now you have an image on ao3! I reccomend opening the work page in a private browsing/incognito/ask a friend who isn’t on your computer, to look at the page and make sure it’s showing. Image hosting sites can be a little wonky with hotlinking at times and just because you can see it when you’re logged into both services, doesn’t mean anyone else can.
If you really don’t want to use Google services, there are sadly not a whole lot of image hosting sites that allow hotlinking, and host images for a lot time without buying it. Twitter though surprisingly does!
Click tweet and add your image
And just tweet it like normal.
Find the tweet page and right click
and grab the image address/source like you did with the google photos tutorial and then follow the AO3 steps from the Google Photos Tutorial above.
There are other services out there i’m sure but I haven’t used them myself or they cost money. I’ve heard Cloudinary is good, but I’m not sure about the free version of it.
I know the Google Photos links don’t expire, but I’m not sure about Twitter’s links. The images I have on Google Photos have been on ao3 for over 2 years without the links going bad though so I know for a fact it’ll work long term.
Let me know if you have any questions or other sites for me to try out and tutorialise! (It’s easiest to reach my via DM or my ask box, not by replying to the post)
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