The tricky part about images in a forum post is how the text wraps to the browsers window size.
A pic wider than ~640 pixels, say 800 or more pixels will make everyone's browser window add a Horizontal scroll bar so you can scroll to see the pic depending on that users screen settings.
The problem is the text uses that width too, so if there is a lot of text, not just in that post but every post on the "page of displayed posts" which here is what, about 20? You have to Horizontally scroll your browser back and forth for every line of text in every post.
And don't forget the side ad's and member name columns for each post space in the browser window too.
No problem for those running say a 1600x1400 browser window, but 1152x864 is about as high as I can go on all 3 big monitors and still read it.
I tend to use a lot of images for my help and project posts and for me anyway find the right picture in the right place of the post text to be crucial so have never been a fan of 'pic albums' and thumbnails at the end, especially Flash based ones, but they are a boon for those without resources of their own.
I have my own co-hosted Win2K3 server on fiber and Terabytes of free disc space so I host all my own images and resample them to 640x wide as habit and just use a link for any wider version like this for example:
My 3 monitor desktop screenshot resampled down to 640x wide.
Full 3458x846 Pic Link.
SYSOP GUY PLEASE READ
I love how linked images over 640x get resized on the fly with a little banner line to click for full sized image, I didn't use it here as I know the whole image has to resampled and then display by your server and that slows things down for everyone but I could use that on some of my sites, could you point me to good place to look for one for Win2K3 please?
Thanks ;-}