Chris, on your first question, I just discovered that, while uploading to the gallery, if you fail to specify a file to upload, the green progress indicator will go on "forever". 😱 Also, if there's a temporary glitch in the internet things may be slow.
On your second question about resizing the photo, the "how" depends on the specific photo editing software you use. I output from Lightroom to a full-size TIFF as an intermediate step to various later uses. For uploading to the Gallery, I then open the TIFF in the Mac shareware program GraphicConverter where some additional tweaking/cropping can be done. The final steps here will use its "Scale" feature, where I specify Proportional Scaling and enter the desired long-side pixel dimension (1022 for me but the gallery allows 1500) and let the short side fall where it may from any cropping done. Then a little final sharpening (15%), add a 2-pixel black border, and Save-As a JPEG in my chosen output folder... Carefully avoiding saving over my original TIFF!
Here the GC program optionally brings up a final window where I can choose to keep the EXIF or discard it, etc, and a slider for JPEG compression amount. I slide the slider while watching the output filesize indicator to give me something within the Maximum File Size shown at the bottom of the Photo Upload Form (~390k, but I try to keep it around 225k or less). Despite that I avoid going below about 60% compression on the slider to prevent visible artifacts.
Is this helpful? Your image software should have similar features.
Edit: By the way, to prepare a photo to be your Avatar, the same procedure as above, with different file size limits: "The maximum size of your custom image is 150 by 191 pixels or 146.5 KB (whichever is smaller)" Mine is 125 x 125 which IIRC was a former limit.
Geez, look at that... "Join Date: Sep 2003" -- It's been 10 years!
