curious

curious as to why a person must set up a account with photoshop or another to post a pic in a forum..

ECCIE is not a hosting site for pictures. Hosting may need tons of space. If you want to share lot of pics then thats the only solution. It is not a mandatory or ECCIE doesn't recommend any site.

I've never tried it myself, but i believe you can use the "attachment" function to add a pic to your post, but i believe there is a limit to the # of attachments you can post (probably because of space constraints as Modda points out above).

I tried that and found it asked for a www site instead of just loading one from your computer like you can for the avatar.

Yes avatars r small images and the site has the capacity to store and load them accordingly and every profile has small storage space. When you put a link (for a pic, video etc) the site doest store that, instead it always resolves and displays from the external server. Avatars r stored in our site and they always load from the site .... utilizing site bandwidth (storage).