Posting photos to the MSU News Service page on Facebook

In addi­tion to post­ing links to our news sto­ries from our Facebook page, you can also post copies of our high-resolution pho­tos so that our fans can see them Facebook and “like” them or com­ment on them.

If you’re already famil­iar with how to post pho­tos to Facebook, you may be able to skip most of the early part of this arti­cle. However, for consistency’s sake, you will prob­a­bly want to read the items that deal with cap­tions and post­ing pho­tos to the Facebook wall so that we’re all doing things the same way.

1. First off, find a high-resolution photo you want to share from our News Service pages. The links to these are located at the bot­tom of any sto­ries we’ve attached them to, such as this one.
2. Click on the “view or down­load” link to the indi­vid­ual photo. You’ll be taken to a win­dow that dis­plays a large ver­sion of the photo, along with some infor­ma­tion about down­load­ing the photo.
3. Follow the instruc­tions there to down­load the photo to your hard drive. You want to save the photo to a folder where you can eas­ily find it later. I’d sug­gest sav­ing it to the desk­top. Name it what­ever you like when you save — the name doesn’t mat­ter to how it’s dis­played on Facebook.
4. Hit your Web browser’s back but­ton and return to the main story page. We’re going to need to get some infor­ma­tion from this page later on, so keep it open.
5. Now, in a new browser win­dow or tab, go to Facebook. If you’re not already logged in to Facebook, do so now.
6. Navigate to the MSU News Service page on Facebook (the one that looks like the photo at right). You can do this by going to your own pro­file and click­ing on your “Info” tab. A list of your pages is at the bot­tom, where you can click on the MSU News Service. Alternatively, you can just click here to go directly to the page. You might want to book­mark this page for future use.
   
7. At the top of the page are a series of light-blue tabs. We’re inter­ested in the one labeled “Photos.” Find it and click on it. That will take you to a page that lists all the MSU News Service photo albums on Facebook. Right now, there are only two: pro­file pho­tos and “News Service Photos.” Click on the one that labeled “News Service Photos.” (Alternately, click here.)
     
8. You’ll be taken to a page that dis­play an assort­ment of the images in that photo album. There’s a line of blue text links, just below our logo. One of those links says “Add more pho­tos.” Click on it.
   
9. You are then taken to the screen for upload­ing new pho­tos. Depending on your Web browser, you may have to click on a box to give Facebook per­mis­sion to open the uploader on your com­puter. Once you have given any nec­es­sary per­mis­sion, you’ll be pre­sented with the uploader screen.
   
10. Use the left col­umn to nav­i­gate to the folder on your com­puter where you stored the photo. When you click on that folder, the images con­tained in it should appear in the right col­umn. Each image will have a lit­tle blank box in the upper-left cor­ner. Put a check­mark in the empty box to select that photo for upload­ing.
    
    When you’re done select­ing pho­tos for upload­ing, hit the “upload” but­ton above the right col­umn. You’ll next see a progress screen to let you know your photo is upload­ing.
    
11. When the upload is com­plete, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can edit the cap­tion for the photo(s) you just uploaded. The screen is a list of pho­tos and cap­tions. Your newly uploaded pho­tos will be at the bot­tom of the screen next a blank spot for your cap­tion.
      
12. Here’s where keep­ing that other Web browser window/tab comes in handy. Go back to the MSU News Service story page that started it all, select the cap­tion for your photo, return to the Facebook screen, and paste in the caption.
13. Next, go back to the News Service story page and copy the URL (Web address) of the story. Then go back to the Facebook page, go to your cap­tion, hit a line break or two, and type in a sen­tence that says some­thing like: “Read this story on the Web at” and paste in the URL. That way, read­ers look­ing at the pho­tos can find their way back to the MSU News pages and read our stuff.
14. When you’re done, hit the “save changes” but­ton at the bot­tom of the Facebook screen.
15. After you save the changes, you’ll be pre­sented with a lit­tle win­dow that looks like this:
    
    What this does is pub­lish the pho­tos to the main “wall” (news­feed) on the News Service’s Facebook page. I usu­ally skip this step, since I’ve just uploaded the story related to the photo and don’t want to double-up on the noti­fi­ca­tions I sent to our fans. However, if you’re upload­ing a photo by itself — with­out hav­ing uploaded an accom­pa­ny­ing story, you might con­sider pub­lish­ing the photo.

And that’s it. As always, if you have any prob­lems, please let me know.