The purpose of this post is to see what happens (if anything) when uploading images with the Scribefire Quickblogging toolbar. This is a Firefox toolbar that shows up when you navigate to a post on your blog.

After the image is uploaded, Scribefire shows a dialog, “Confirm Post Appearance,” prompting you to confirm the formatting and location of the image.  The dialog shows buttons for

• aligning the image left, center, and right without wrapping
• aligning the image left, center, and right with wrapping
• and moving the image up and down withing the post

That’s uploading image from your computer. Now I test uploading images from the web:

Problems:

• You have to save all changes to your blog post, if any, before clicking on the image upload button. Otherwise, the changes will be lost.

• There doesn’t seem to be an option for uploading web images to your webserver.

While WordPress doesn’t have such an option either, it would be useful to have one in Scribefire. For web-based images, Scribefire doesn’t actually upload images, notwithstanding the name of the tool button. Rather it inserts an IMG tag that references the remote location of the image:

<img src=”http://www.sxc.hu/pic/m/s/sn/snowman01/756129_yellow_flowers.jpg” alt=”" />

This is called ‘hotlinking’ and it’s frowned upon because it uses the resources of the remote server.

Screenshots

Scribefire Image Upload: API vs FTP

Scribefire Image Upload: Confirm Post Appearance

Related posts:

1. How does WordPress generate HTML image (IMG) references?
2. FBI Locates Osama bin Laden … on Google Images
3. Making Minor Changes in WordPress Without Updating the Last-Updated Date with the Minor Edit Plugin

The “Image Description” was set to “Yellow flowers”. WordPress set the “alt” attribute to “Yellow flowers”, but not the “title” attribute. This means that there is no “tooltip” that appears when you hover the mouse over the photo.

The image below was added with the “Add an Image” button in the “Add Media” toolbar.

The Description was again set, this time to “White Wedding Flowers”. Here again , the “alt” attribute was set while the “title” attribute was not.

Also, for both methods, WordPress doesn’t copy the images to the local uploads directory, rather it makes a direct link to the image file on a remote server. This is called hotlinking, and it’s a definite Internet no-no.

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2. WordPress Cutline Theme Resizes Image in Internet Explorer but not Firefox
3. Ten Cool New Features in WordPress 2.9