# Guidelines for making images visible

Fairly often in the review queues one encounters posts from new (or not-so-new) users who lack the reputation needed to include images visibly. Sometimes I have the time to replace images of equations with $\LaTeX$ equivalents, and sometimes I simply edit the Question (or Answer) to make an image visible.

My thought is that the image may not make the Question a good one, but it's a step in the direction of improvement. If the Question seems VLQ otherwise, I will not bother, and sometimes I'll make the image visible by drilling down to the underlying post and editing there (so that the Edit does not serve as an indication/tick-mark that a Review was completed). However mostly I make the image visible whenever it seems to plausibly support the Question (or Answer).

What guidelines do others follow in leaving images linked or making them visible?

• If it can be fairly straightforwardly converted to text and $\LaTeX$, I do so; otherwise I embed the image. The only real annoyance connected with the latter is that most of the images are in .png format and have to be converted. – Brian M. Scott May 14 '16 at 20:47
• @BrianM.Scott "fairly straightforwardly converted to text and $\LaTeX$" would also apply to those blurry smartphone photos of textbook (or scribbled homework) pages, and that may be much more of an annoyance than png to jpg conversion ... – Hagen von Eitzen May 15 '16 at 10:08
• @Hagen: Not to me; others may of course have a different view of the matter. I’ve not yet run into a photo that was blurry enough to be a problem, and I’ve been reading students’ handwriting for decades. – Brian M. Scott May 15 '16 at 15:18
• @BrianM.Scott: Do images in .png format need conversion? I think that is the default format for imgur. However I do occasionally need to convert image formats, since I think .svg is not yet supported by the image uploader. – hardmath May 15 '16 at 17:14
• @hardmath: I’m pretty sure that I’ve had that problem. The two imgur images that I just now checked are .jpg, and they upload fine if you remember to go to the actual image page, not the page that shows the image with the comments below it. – Brian M. Scott May 15 '16 at 17:22