This may see like a silly idea but has any consideration been given to giving members the option to give a URL for the images in their gallery?

Certain member groups only could have upload access while regular members would still be allowed to have a gallery with images that were hosted remotely. This would prevent a site's server from getting clogged down with uploaded images, yet still give members a gallery of sorts to work on the forum.

I dunno. This may not work with the way that the gallery functions presently but if it's possible it could be a nice feature... particularly those that have limited server space.

This would help me a lot too, anyone have any solutions?

If the images aren't hosted on imagehosts you'd be stealing bandwidth from other sites, if they are on imagehosts there's always a chance they'll be removed and you'll be missing pics in ahem... "your" gallery.

It would be an extremely hideous feature, and personally I don't think any mod makers should ever even consider something like this, if there's a way to turn your gallery into crap, then this is it.

If you can't handle the bandwidth or the space, you shouldn't have a gallery, simple as that.

There are built in options to limit bandwidth per member group if its really needed

Well its not a hideous feature. It could be helpful to those that like to ONLY host their images on their own servers but still want to display their content on your site. I also think that, even if this wasn't integrated, that a way to download from a URL would be nice as well. Sometimes I'm able to get an image up on another site of mine but then I can't find it except for on that site, it would be lovely to not have to re-save it just because I can't find it at that moment or am on someone else's computer and just upload via a URL.

Just a thought.