How do I add a picture to my Web page?

If you're trying to add a picture on your Web page that's already somewhere else on the Internet, there are two different ways you can accomplish this task.

The first one, the easier one, is to simply right click (or, if you're on a Mac, Control-click) on the image when you view that page that hosts it. Your Web browser will pop up a menu of options, one of which will be something like "Copy Image Location" or "Copy Image" or similar. Do that.

Now the fully qualified URL of the image is in your copy and paste buffer. Go to the source of the Web page where you want to add the image then use the menu option Edit --> Paste to copy the URL of the image into your own Web page. Save the page. Done!

Here's an example of this. Let's say you were visiting the Department of Homeland Security Web site and really liked its logo. You right click on the image on the page then choose "Copy Image".

Now your copy and paste buffer will have this:

To include that graphic on your own page, you'll want to type in the following:

then place your cursor between the two quotes and choose Edit --> Paste. Now it'll look like this:

Add that to your page, load your page in a Web browser, and you'll see this:

Make sense?

The other way you can do this is to download the image to your own computer, then upload it to your Web server and use a local reference. It's more complicated, but that way the Government site doesn't have to serve up graphics for your personal page.

To do this, right click on the image as before, but this time choose "Save Image As..." and save it to your Desktop, naming it suitably for your uses. Now use whatever tool you use to upload your HTML files to your public server (probably an FTP tool of some sort) and upload the graphic file itself.

Let's say that it's called dhs-header-title.jpg for purposes of explanation. Since you've uploaded it into the same directory that will contain your HTML, your HTML references to the image are simply:

Before we leave this answer, however, a brief note that regardless of what type of site you're building, commercial or personal, you should respect the copyright and intellectual property ownership of images on other sites. Just because the Motorola logo looks cool doesn't mean you have a legal right to include it on your site, copied or otherwise.

Some sites don't have this restriction, notably governmental sites, but the vast majority of Web sites out there should be assumed to have protected or legally off-limits images. If there's any doubt, email the webmaster and ask for permission.

Hope this sheds some light on your puzzlement!