Anyone wanna tell me why one of these attached photos is upside down and one isn't? Because they're the same photo uploaded the same way. What's the deal?
Since I had trouble figuring out how to reduce large pictures to something that will fit in this forum though I would go ahead and post what I learned. Feel free to comment if there is a better approach.
I opened my 2MB pictures (from my phone) using Paint on my computer. I clicked on resize and changed from percentage to pixels and then changed the horizontal number to 500. It automatically sets the vertical to keep the aspect ratio. At 500 pixels the image is around 77KB and appears to be a nice size for posting. I also took one to 100 pixels (9KB) which is fairly small and would work for an avatar. My actual avatar is 163 pixels wide which was after I cropped an image I resized to 200. My avatar is 34KB)