Resizing hassles

[BoomRider]

Hey there,
I have a great heap of pics I'd like to share. Yet I find the amount of resizing I'd have to do is prohibitive.
My camera is usually set on 6mp. Most of the pics I've taken were before I joined here.
I took a drive down south this weekend and saw an interesting old machine. So I thought I'd take a snap or two for this site. I set my camera's resolution to the lowest setting. Even after resizing this small image to 640/480 it was still 300+kb.
I certainly respect any and all of the rules on this site. Are images are limited to 100kb due to server space and bandwidth?
Can someone please explain why we can't use a good reputable imagehost.
And i'm open to any other efficient hassle free solutions. There must be an easy way to take a 1.2mb image down to a 100kb image without it looking like it was drawn with coloured sand!!!
Other than this I think this site is great, I've found it to be an excellent source of info and I'd like to able to contribute what I can. I don't have a great deal of industry experience yet, though I have been busy with the camera!
Thanks fellas, any help will be appreciated!

[Steve Frazier]

This question comes up quite a bit and there are reasons we have things set up the way we do. Not all of our members have high speed connections and by limiting file sizes we not only conserve bandwidth but also keep the load time of pages at a reasonable length for everyone. For this same reason of load time we do not allow linking to host sites, it would lengthen load times for those with dial up.

Another reason for not allowing links to host sites is we lose the ability to control physical size. One picture that is oversized will foul up a whole page of forum replies, requiring that members scroll from left to right to read the posts. I absolutely detest having to do that and it won't happen here.

I use www.irfanview.com to resize my pics. When you click to save your pic, you can adjust the resolution so that the file size meets our requirements. I've never lost any noticeable picture quality in reducing any of my pics, make sure you save the files as .jpegs.

[BoomRider]

Thanks for the quick response Steve.
I use Irfanview as well. I'll keep at it!
I certainly agree about pic sizes and load times! Thats why I use small clickable thumbnails that link to a host. I appreciate your help, and thanks to Squizzy246B for the resizer.

Cheers