At least half of the people that come here are using analog modem connections between 28K and 50K in speed. For example, a 22k picture would take 7 seconds at 28k - a typical modem speed. The orginal picture of your dog and cat would take near a minute to download to someone without a high speed connection.
Ideally, keep the pictures below 30K and trim out some of the dead space and/or resample the image to a smaller size. An 800/600 image is larger than the entire screen for people with WebTV (there are a few) - So big as to make it difficult for them to pan the screen back and forth... If you take your high res 800/600 image (around 300K) and save as a JPG at around 60% quality at 400/300, the file size would still be pretty clear and around 20K in size - downloading much quicker for those on a cable modem..
Many of us accessing from work and home have high speed service and things load very quickly (well, at least since the board software upgrade
) but for those accessing over a modem, it can be very irritating
Thanks...