How do I leave a picture as a MySpace comment?

It's not too hard to add pictures (or a picture, at least) to a comment you leave someone else on MySpace, but there's one critical thing you need to know: you can't host the picture itself on MySpace, you need to use a different server or services to actually serve up the graphical file. You just "point to it" in the comment you leave on MySpace.

There is a way you can sidestep this a bit, however, and I'll show you how to do that because it's pretty fun. Basically, you do an image search and find an image you like, figure out the URL (fully qualified Web address) of the image file, and use that in your comment.

For example, if you went to Google Images and searched for Thanks for the Add, you'll find that there are over 130,000 matching images that Google knows about. Sweet!

Here's one that I thought was nice:

Clicking on the image takes me to a page that has the key item we seek:

The link to right click on "See Fullsize Image":

What you want to do is choose "Copy Link" or "Copy Image Address". Now you have the URL of the desired image in your copy and paste buffer. Next step, back to MySpace!

On MySpace, find the profile of someone for whom you want to leave a comment, and just above their existing comments you'll see:

No surprise here, click on "Add Comment" and now you'll be facing a blank entry box, a typical MySpace experience as a user, actually! To add your comment -- and image -- you need to delve into a little HTML, however. The trick is to know that the img src tag lets you reference a graphic and have the actual graphic displayed rather than the HTML. Since we know the image address from Google Images, we'll paste that into the img tag, so that it ends up looking like this:

To be specific to this graphic, it looks like this:

Adding that, and a few words, to the comment box, it ends up looking like this:

To actually add the comment (well, to submit the comment and hope it's approved) just click on the "Post a Comment" button and you're done.

Hope that clarifies things, and feel free to add a comment to my own MySpace Profile if you want to practice! :-)

One caveat: just because you can find the URL or address of an image, doesn't mean that you have the legal right to use it on the Web. I would be particularly careful of images that are hosted by commercial firms like Starbucks or McDonalds.