Just a little more background.

Forums operate on a database, it keeps everything in order like threads, posts, links, members, who is online, activity and more. It's done this way so that you and others can find things easily and stored in a logical way.
When I first designed and setup the forums I allowed the photos to be stored within the database, because honestly I didn't see us getting as big as we have become and if the past 3 years is anything to go by we will be growing even more!

The database is about 650m in size at the moment, that is all posts and pictures that have been uploaded into the gallery. My last count there were just short of 6,000 images in the database.

The larger the database the more powerful computer is needed to search for things... remember there can be anywhere over 100 people looking at things on the forum at the same time so this causes the database to get really hammered.

If I can find a way to pull the pictures out that have been uploaded into the gallery, it will reduce the size of the database and lessen the load therefore giving everyone a faster and more stable experience while online here.
Uploading attachments (pics, scans or documents) have been suspended, but you are more welcome to post pictures using a image hosting service which 99.9% of forums ask you to do and embed them into your posts just like Taily mentioned in the above post.