Fark Paul thats either a lot of photo's or you upload your photo's to photobucket at the original size that they are taken.
I don't use photobucket anymore, personally I think its a waste of time for me. If I was sharing photo's with multiple forums and friends then yes I would use photobucket because of simply linking and sharing the link on the various forums / friends.
I only upload photo's to this forum and the occasional facebook post so I it's pointless
( waste of time uploading ) for me to upload photo's to photobucket.
There is no need to upload photo's at their original size for the web its pointless and takes longer to upload than smaller file sizes. Just compare uploading 1 digital camera file at say 2-6mb depending on your camera settings to a resized photo at 200-500kb. a lot of difference in time uploading especially when doing a heap of photo's at once.
I use a program called fotosizer:
www.fotosizer.com it's fress and relative simple to use.
You can do one photo at a time or batch ( multiply ) photo's
I save all my photo's from digital camera and phone to pc and only resize the photo's I want to upload.
Do you use photobucket as a backup as well hence uploading original file sizes ( which I assume you are doing )??? If so forget it, again there is no point in uploading photo's to various free websites just for a backup.
Back up your photo's to a removable hard drive and keep it at a friend's place or if at home in a fireproof safe. Backing up original size photo's to a removable drive again is much quicker than uploading it to a website.
Thats my 2cents worth on the subject
Out of curiosity, do you backup your important data ( word, exel....etc ) on a regular basis to anywhere other than the pc????