How to post large amount (over 3) of pictures in a question?

Question

I often see questions where there are a lot of illustrations posted which is a good thing. On the other hand it often makes the questions:-

• Fragmented, text between large sized images get lost.
• Overly long as a couple of pictures introduce a large scroll bar which makes the question over all harder to read.

Here is an example.

Answer 1

You can use a built-in functionality of imgur (the Stack Exchange image hoster) to resize the pictures: see Resizing an image in a post? on Meta Stack Exchange. It requires a bit of fiddling with the Markdown of the post (changing links) but I did it e.g. here: What is this red flowering shrub?. You can check the revision history to see what I changed:

This is the end result:

---

_{(click to enlarge images)}

Answer 2

The upload and formatting of images is poorly done by the StackExchange network in terms of a user friendly interface. Let's just walk through the knowledge that you need to have to upload a picture:

• you must know the size of your picture before you try and upload it or you could find it is larger than the 2 Mb limit which is ten times smaller than the limit for imgur users
• if you want to use a table you have to use Markdown

If you have tried to upload a picture that is too large there is no way to resize the photo without leaving your post to use another program.

There is no drag and drop facility with groups of photos. Users find the syntax of a photo link is unforgiving. As a moderator it is common to see incomplete questions due to mangled photo link syntax

This users of this community frequently use photos from cell phones and a I estimate that very few of them know Markdown.

The end result is:

• abandoned questions where the user gave up
• questions that cannot be answered as the user was not able to post a photo
• questions that need work from the community to resize photos or recreate links

One solution would be improve the coding on the upload screen so it automatically resizes photos larger than the limit and automatically converts formats that are not accepted. A drag and drop interface for multiple uploads would be awesome.

Answer 3

With the tables support, available via Show formatting tips -> Tables anyone can easily structure large number of images if needed.

Create tables using the GitHub-flavored markdown format

Here is structured format for the example mentioned in the question. Images if inserted using Ctrl + G, will be clickable if someone would like to zoom.

1. Example format for two images:

   | | |
   |-|-|
   | 1st picture | 2nd picture |
   

2. Example format for three images:

   | | | |
   |-|-|-|
   | 1st picture | 2nd picture | 3rd picture |
   

3. Example format for four images:

   | 1st picture | 2nd picture |
   |-|-|
   | 3rd picture | 4th picture |