The forum software (Simple Machines Forum or SMF for short) used on NG is free and its capabilities and features reflect the priorities of the developers. While SMF works well in general, for some inscrutable reason making images appear inline in posts hasn't been seen as a necessity by the SMF core crew. On photo forum like NG that lack of feature can cause minor annoyances.
There are two solutions. Either switch to a forum software able to handle image positioning and resizing better, or use hacks to the existing software.
The first alternative will incur costs that the NG Team considers excessive given we are in the first build-up stage of this community, and nobody knows enough of the future to predict its paths and directions. If the site becomes popular we may have to require members pay for the privilege by subscription. In that case, fees will be kept as low as possible though, to allow any one access without making them (or wallets) feel ripped off. If we go the subscription route, guest visitors will by and large be blocked or prevented from seeing images. The forum then will be migrated to commercial software and revenue used to pay the incurred costs.
The second alternative is applying to the members to follow some simple rules for posting images. The easiest way is just uploading image(s) as attachments. We have modified the behaviour of SMF to resize such attachments to a standard size making them easily viewable without need for clicking (in fact, the CSS hack behind the curtains removes the click-up option entirely, which can be seen either as beneficial or detrimental. You can still access the full-sized image through right-clicking, though. Works on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, possibly with other browsers). You should pay proper attention to the fact that post text and image(s) now are separated, and strive for a posting approach where you split the topic into separate posts each with a single, or few, attachment(s). Adding a densely populated attachment section will not look too good unless you split into smaller posts. Although we have set the maximum attachment *number* quite high, each attachment *size* currently is limited to 1 MB.
Alternatively, you can host your images externally and use the IMAGE button ("Insert Image") on the BBC header when posting your topic to enclose the URL in IMG tags. Do note that file paths local to your own computer won't work as the "Insert Image" feature is path-setting not uploading images. This approach produces inline images and thus does not separate text and image as such.
A variant of this method is posting with image attachment(s) first, then retrieving the server URL of each uploaded attachment and enclose that URL with IMG tags. A bit clumsy perhaps, but should work, and again has the advantage of making the message flow continuous with embedded images.
Play around with the options at hand to make the most out of the current NG.
