best way to post pictures / picture series ?

[-Philipp-]

Excuse me if I have overlooked something in the FAQ sections or something:

I found myself posting quite a bunch of big pics lately (offset guitars sure need high resolution pics as they are s*xy as hell  ) - mostly from photobucket & flickr.

Will posting a series of big pics cause bandwith problems in the long run when posting / viewing such topics ? Currently I'm not sure what way is good or what shouldn't be done. Also I don't exactly understand these bandwith, hotlinking things to well and it would be good to know which other things could/should be considered.

I once used imageshack wich featured a resized photopreview for forums. I'm missing this feature on photobucket, but its just too comfortable ... Is there a way to reduce the pic with using the forums IMG Tag ? Is there a "best practice" on how to post pictures ?

[Charles Obscure]

I usually resize pictures on my comp before uploading them to Photobucket.
Anything that's large I scale down to a maximum of 800 x 600. That size usually works fine unless there are other forum-specific restrictions.

[mezcalhead]

Yeah, I guess the main thing is not to make them so huge that someone looking at the thread has to scroll sideways.

Bandwidth isn't a problem with hotlinking since the hosting site (eg photobucket) provides the bandwidth.

Presumably hosting sites make their profit from advertising since they have a certain number of people visiting their site to post pics, and the advertisers are prepared to pay to get their ads seen by that traffic. Where it gets a little greyer is when you hotlink to websites that don't host as part of their business model. Some of them will attempt to block hotlinking to reduce the drain on their bandwidth. If this is causing a problem or you are worried about it you can always download the pic yourself and then upload it to your photobucket or whatever and link it from there.