Please resize the graphics. There are two reasons:
- The entire big graphic is still loaded and as a result it will be painfully slow if you have a large graphic that you're trying to shrink.
- Web browsers tend to be absolutely pitiful at resizing images. The images will look much worse than if you'd done the resizing job yourself.
Another related misconception, however, is created by the person who originally posted the thread. It is true that the graphics do not burden
Free Republic's server. However, they do burden the server that hosts the graphics. If you don't have access to a very high capacity server, you are likely to find that your graphics are still going to slow things down quite a bit during busy times. So if you're using your company's web server to host the images, you may well be hurting your company itself during peak times. Bear that in mind before putting images on threads likely to be extremely busy (i.e. with thousands of pageviews an hour).
Remember that somewhere between 1% and 5% of total page views provoke a response from members. So for every 1000 responses, you could be talking about as much as 100,000 reads. This means that posting images is not at all inconsequential a load to put on your server.
Hope that helps.
D