Showing Images in Posts - Need Help...

[JCW]

I'm currently only allowing users to embed photos in their posts from outside links (hosted offsite).

However, I want the users to stay under 500x500. I found a javascript/hack here to help with that, but I'm not sure that's my best remedy.

So, here's some of my questions:

1). Is there a way for me to have their posts of offsite hosted images show as a thumbnail that requires a click to show a larger size?

2). I'm thinking that an alternative is to forbid off-site linking and opt for allowing image uploads. If I do that, a). can offsite linking to images be disabled? b). can I then limited the size/dimensions of uploded images (I think that is built-in to vB)?, and c). what kind of bandwidth (disk/transfer) use are we talking about? If I have about 1MB per day, and that images is shown 1,000 times, that would be 1GB of transfer per day right? But each day brings more images, which in turn makes multiple image displays per day. So, each day the bandwidth transfer rate could actually double. Someone help me figure this one out please. Thanks.

3). Is there a way to have upload images show as thumbnails? And, if so, will they show the larger image when clicked?

It seems like hosting the images myself allows me to control the image size/dimensions and keeps users from being able to link to whatever they want (or changing the photos on their host)...right?

JC