I think it is a great idea myself. Never having the need to join any photo storage sites myself I can only see this as a positive step.

They are restricting the photos/images to 250kb in size which is still very generous.

It's a great new option, and I have not had to un block any thing, I have firefox with adblock plus and easylist, so no need to see the ads.
The reason for them to do this is so they can try to control the size of the picture files people are adding to their posts. The new option has a size limit. This is a good thing. When someone includes a huge file it can seriously slow down page load speed and for those on dialup that can make access frustratingly slow.

My guess is that you may have some thing else blocked like java?

I am very happy to see this new option and hope they work out the bugs and get it implemented.

Thanks! I value your opinions and defer to your expertise!
I appreciate your answers.

Raven - I had to unblock - GW load Images in java. It took me a long time to find it.

It's fine for those who don't use a photo-hosting site, but I love Smugmug and have no desire to jump through GW hoops to post a pic.

I also agree it's fine for those that don't use a photo-hosting site. Or even those who do that just wants to quickly and easily add an image to a post.

I'm picky/funny/strange though, so I host my own. I probably use a script pretty similar to what gardenweb uses but instead of automatically inserting the image into the post, it just returns the image code. If the image is wider than 640px it creates a smaller more web-friendly thumb which is linked to the full-sized image. So, it saves me typing, saves me having to manually create thumbs, and allows me to at least offer the full resolution image.