Are you trying to post some images on cohost, but you wish you could arrange them into a column instead of cropping them into a grid? Or maybe you're annoyed at the attachment limit? You want to put some text between your images? Some images between your text? This is the post for you!
Here's a tip: you can actually attach as many images as you want to a post and arrange them however you like if you embed them instead of using the attachment button.
You can embed an image by using the following markdown:
...or the following html (though there's not much reason to do it like this unless you're doing a bunch of extra styling and formatting):
<img src="image URL goes here">
If your attached image doesn't show up full width (and you would like it to), use the following html:
<img src="image URL goes here" style="width: 100%;">
If you want to add alt text to an image attached via html, you can do that too:
<img src="image URL goes here" alt="alt text goes here">
As an aside, you can also embed images into the comments using the markdown method outlined above. (It won't work with the html method if I recall correctly)
To find out about more cool markdown stuff you can do, check out the site's official markdown cheatsheet (which can be accessed any time by clicking the question mark button in the bottom left of the post composer). There's some basic html and css stuff there as well that you can copy and paste into your posts.
Now, in order to be able to attach an image via URL, it has to be uploaded somewhere so you can paste the link. Cohost's recommended method of doing this is by putting your image into a post, then saving that post as a draft instead of posting it. You can then copy the image link from the draft post, and paste the link into your actual post. (Be sure not to delete the draft posts, though, or the link will break eventually -- uploaded images that are not attached to any posts are eligible for deletion, for security reasons)
I don't like the way this clogs up my drafts, so instead my personal preferred method is creating a private page that I use only for image uploads, and copying the links from the posts on that page.
For the record, staff have said that they intend to replace the drafts method of embedding images in the future, but they've got a lot on their plate and they're not there yet.
If all of this sounds incredibly annoying to you, You can also just make a new image that has all of your desired images pasted into one really tall image, and attach that instead. Seriously. You can upload some obscenely vertical pngs to this web site and as long as it's under 5mb it won't stop you. I recommend against this method for really, really tall images, though, as the automatic-readmore doesn't always seem to like kicking in for attachments, and you probably don't want to create an obstacle on your followers' timelines. I try to only use this method for when I want to post a column of just like 2 or 3 images.
While the power of html can allow you to arrange and style your images pretty much however you want, doing that can get tedious really quickly if you want to be particular about your margins, or arrange your images into a grid, or if you want people to be able to click an image to expand it (the regular lightbox feature doesn't work with embedded images). Fortunately, people have already made tools to help with this kind of thing!
My personal favorite is nex3's image grid generator. All you have to do is tell it how many images you want per row (you can set this to 1 to make a column), paste in your image links, tweak whatever settings you want, and click a button to copy a big stupid wall of html that you can simply paste into your posts. By default, it's set up to make it so people can simply left click on your images to open them full-size in a new tab. It rules.
