Alectric,
As Rob indicated, I haven't had a chance to setup a mechanism to allow him to manage images on the web server. He uses and likes Photobucket, and the approach works well overall. Yesterday's issue was the first time I have seen a problem with Photobucket availability in more than 18 months.
At some point we'll need to change our approach, but it works fine for our current traffic volume and storage footprint. As far as advantages go, there are several strong advantages to a distributed approach, but I am quite sure we're not benefiting measurably from distribution given our relatively low demand. Our choice is one driven by functional simplicity rather than operational necessity.
-cec