If someone is going to post pictures here, they shouldn't do it if they don't understand how to compress and resize images. There's rarely a need to post an image more than about 500 pixels wide. I usually make mine 640 pixels wide, just because that's the width of a standard VGA screen, even though I doubt anyone is using VGA these days. Most folks on desktop PCs have display widths of at least 1024 pixels, although much of that is not available in a message post.
While resizing, you should also compress the image by reducing its quality. A small reduction in quality is unnoticeable on a computer screen, but makes the file significantly smaller. Smaller files load faster.
I'll add that you should resize and compress even if you're using a third-party site like photobucket to host your images.
How to do it? Well there are as many different ways to do it as there are photo editing programs. But there's no need to buy high-end software like Photoshop; there are plenty of free alternatives:
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a image-editing package. <a href="http://gimp.org">http://gimp.org</a>
My preferred tool for resizing images is Image Magick, which is a set of command-line utilities for image manipulation. It is available on Windows and Mac OS/X in addition to its native Linux. <a href="http://imagemagick.org/">http://imagemagick.org/</a>
The "convert" utility from Image Magick is used to resize and compress pictures. For example:
convert oldfile.jpg -resize 1000x750 -quality 70 newfile.jpg
This command will take original image "oldfile.jpg", resize it to 1000x750 and reduce its quality from 100 to 70 percent. Looking at one of my own photos, this reduced the image size from 4000x300 (12 megapixels) to 1000x750 (.75 megapixels) and reduced the file size from 4.9 MB to 196 KB.
You should try to resize to an even fraction of the original image size, although it's not essential if you don't know the original size.
