RESIZING PICTURES
If your pictures are really big, you should either resize the picture to something more forum friendly before uploading to Photobucket, resize them in Photobucket or you can post a clickable thumbnail into your post instead. This keeps your picture from stretching the forum screen so others won't have to scroll side to side to either see the picture or read other posts. 640 x 480 is just fine for a forum post. I think it begins to stretch the page if it gets wider that 700.
Option 1 - posting a clickable thumbnail: If you don't want to shrink your pictures because you want to show more detail, you can post a clickable thumbnail. It puts a small version of your picture in the post. Clicking the picture brings up your full size picture without distorting the original forum thread.
To do that, go back to your Photobucket album. See the little box beside your picture? Click that box to select the picture (you can select more than one). Now scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the "Generate HTML and IMG codes" button. This opens a new window where the codes are already built for you...
[again, the copy and paste function in Photobucket may have changed since I made this post. For you guys running Windows, when you clicked on the IMG code link under the picture, it used to highlight in yellow and automatically copy it to your clipboard like in the pictures shown. That may have changed, so just highlight the code, right click and chose copy (or pres CTRL and C) to copy]
As before, now simply go back to your forum post, right click and select paste or press CTRL and V to paste the code into your post. It'll look something like this (with square instead of curly brackets)...
{URL=http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c###/yourname/yourfolder/yourpicture.jpg}
{IMG}http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c###/yourname/yourfolder/th_yourpicture.jpg{/IMG}{/URL}
...and should look like this in your post. You should remind your readers to "Click on the thumbnail to see the full size image". Go ahead and click on the pick below...
Option 2 - resizing in PhotoBucket: Photobucket allows you to resize your pictures once they've been uploaded. Click on the thumbnail in your gallery to bring up the full size picture. Now click on the "Resize" icon and choose from the list...
Option 3 - resizing before uploading: I like to use the Image Resizer from
Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP. It's really convenient and lets you resize more than one picture at a time. Once installed, you simply right click on a picture, select "resize picture", choose the new picture size (along with a couple other options), click OK and you're done...
If you choose not to resize the originals, that is, make smaller copies, the new file's name will be the same as before, but with either (small), (medium), (large), etc, added.
SELECTING MULTIPLE FILES
So how do you choose more than one file? You've got options based on how the files you want to work with are organized.
If they're all together in a group, and there's no other files in the folder, you can hold down CTRL and A (selects all files), or click on the first file then press SHIFT and END, which selects everything from where you clicked to the end of the folder. Note that CTRL A also selects any subfolders.
If they're all together in a group, but there's other files you don't want to touch, click on the first picture then, while holding down the SHIFT key, click on the last file in the group. This will select all the files between your 1st and 2nd click.
If your files are spread out amongst others, hold down the CTRL key while clicking on the files. Holding down the CTRL key allows you to select more than one file individually.
Once you have them selected, right click while keeping the cursor on one of the selected files. Right clicking with the cursor off a selected picture brings up a different menu and may deselect the pictures.
Linear Mode
