[Eliot Ness]

........ I post a picture and the next day it disappears and leaves some sort of third party hosting mumbo jumbo.......

Photobucket no longer allows you to post pictures on websites unless you pay for the premium service, that's why you run into a lot of posts with that Photobucket error message.   I've switched to IMGUR (free) and most others have switched to another free service also.

I use a free program called InfranView to resize and even do simple editing, although you can also resize in Microsoft Paint, I find InfranView very versatile and easy to use.