Hosting your own pictures

What do I need?

I'm going to assume that your ISP has given you some web space and you want to use this to host your pictures. Before starting, you should check that you are able to access this from outside sites such as Ebay. Freeserve lets you do this, I think Yahoo prevent it.
OK, so what else do you need.

A way of getting pictures into your computer
An image processing program
An FTP program

That's about it if you are just hosting pictures

How do I get pictures into my computer?

I'll try to expand on this a bit in the future. At the moment I'll just mention four obvious methods - Email from a friend. - Download from the web - Using a scanner - Transfered from a camera.

What image processing program shall I use?

There are a lot of image processing programs available. Some a good, and some are difficult. If you already have one and know how to use it, then that's probably the best one for you. If you haven't got one, then a good, fairly easy to use one is Irfanview. It's free and you can download it from this site -
Irfanview Whatever program you choose, it has to be able to save images in jpg format, crop redundants bits from the edged of pictures, resize and rotate images. Another useful feature is the ability to put a caption across your picture to stop it being copied.

What is an FTP program?

FTP stands for file transfer protocol, and an ftp program is exactly what you would expect it to be. It is a simple program that transfers files from your computer onto the web. It handles logging on to your web site and the passwords associated with this. It is also an efficient way of transfering large files and ensuring that there are no errors in the copied file. This facility is incorporated into some editors and a simple version is available through windows. My feeling is that it is far easier to use a single function program to transfer a block of files when you have completed preparations. There are many shareware and free programs available, as a personal choice I use Leech and this is available at
http://stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~jdebis/leechftp/downloads.html

Where do I put my pictures?

To answer this you need to know how your ISP arranges your web space. The most common method is to give you a sub-domain. This is a part of his domain that has a unique address for you. The ISPs domain will be something like www.freeserve.co.uk. To allocate a sub-domain to you he puts a qualified at the beginning so that your address will be www.yourbit.freeserve.co.uk. You need to upload your pictures into this space. This will then give you a URL for ebay that will look something like this -
http://www.yourbit.freeserve.co.uk/yourpic.jpg
You need the http bit to stop your picture address getting tangled up in Ebay's addresses

How can I learn to write html code

The best way is to download an html editor, and experiment. A good editor for you to start with is 1st Page from Evrsoft.
You can download a free copy if you click here.