Mara has the right idea ... to show photos within the body of your mesaage set up an account with something like Photobucket (it's free) and upload your photos there. Near each picture will be a URL that you can use to display your photos here or on other web-based applications.
You can see this at the Photobucket site for the UOAA 2007 conference:
http://s241.photobucket.com/albums/ff15 ... onference/
Under the photo of the guy's back are 4 different URLs, depending on what you plan to use them for. You would use the IMG one for this purpose.
Then you come here and use the html coding to point us to where the photo is located. You will create a string of characters that looks like this:
The nice part about this is that we can see your great photos but they don't take up space or "bandwidth" in the UOAA database.
There is another kind of space that can be a problem - if your photo is really big it will look HUGE on the Forum and will make it necessary for everyone to scroll back and forth in order to read the text of other messages in the thread. So please downsize your photos before linking them.
Here's the same photo I mentioned above, using the process I described. Initially it was 1012 by 600, and exhibited the size problem ... it was wider than the screen by 50%. I used the resizing option right in Photobucket to cut it by half, to get the more pleasing size you see here.
AVATARS - the ones that appear with your profile, are a different story. On your profile page, way at the bottom, you will see directions to upload an image from your own computer files - or elsewhere. The crucial element is the size, they must be very small. To quote from the Avatar Control Panel: "its width can be no greater than 80 pixels, the height no greater than 80 pixels, and the file size no more than 6 KB." You can use all kinds of image manipulation software to achieve that size.