The link I want to use to post a picture on MySpace is too long, what can I do?

In order to post a picture into a MySpace comment or picture caption, you need to actually type in HTML, the "language" of web pages. What you're typing in is the instructions that says "put that picture, here".

It looks something like this:

<img src="http://myspace-355.vo.llnwd.net/00573/55/34/573024355_l.jpg" />

The link we're talking about, called a URL, is this part:

http://myspace-355.vo.llnwd.net/00573/55/34/573024355_l.jpg

If that's too long, then MySpace will not display the picture, and may display something else, like the two dots, instead.

We need to create a shorter URL.

The easiest way to do that is to use a service like SnipURL. Visit http://www.snipurl.com and you'll see this:

On the SnipURL site, enter the "long" version of the URL that you have.

Important: do not enter the actual file name - the characters following the last slash! Only enter everything from the "http" to, but not including, that last "/".

So, using our current example, I would enter this:

http://myspace-355.vo.llnwd.net/00573/55/34/

Note how I left off the file name, "573024355_l.jpg". We'll get to that in a second.

Here's what is looks like in SnipURL:

Now, press the SNIP URL button. The resulting page will show you your now much smaller URL. In my case, I get:

Now we'll put the new SnipURL together with the filename:

http://snipurl.com/15jq6/573024355_l.jpg

is now just a short version of:

http://myspace-355.vo.llnwd.net/00573/55/34/573024355_l.jpg

Which you can now use anywhere you would have used the longer version.

So, to come full circle, in our MySpace "picture in a comment" example, instead of:

<img src="http://myspace-355.vo.llnwd.net/00573/55/34/573024355_l.jpg" />

after creating the SnipURL, we would use this instead:

<img src="http://snipurl.com/15jq6/573024355_l.jpg" />

As you can see, it's much shorter.

Caution: in putting together this article, I attempted to use a similar service called "TinyURL". I'm not certain, but it appears that MySpace is actively preventing TinyURL from being used in cases like this.

As a result, I'm not certain of the future for SnipURL. However, for the moment, I was able to confirm that everything above, when followed exactly, works.