Images were disabled a while ago because some people were abusing the privilege, mainly by posting huge graphics that ate up bandwidth and made the threads take forever to load. Also, there was excessive use of unauthorized smilies from other websites, the use inordinate numbers of authorized smilies, and also some people were using huge graphics in their signatures, which evidently slowed things down, too.
You can do a Search in ATMB under “images” and turn up all the gruesome details. Me, I’ve got some paint drying at this end, I’d rather sit here and watch that.