Just posted on smartor's site...  just a way of maybe including it as a new BBCode field or something for users to copy & then use in other forums (ones which dont allow .php extensions as image url links) and only allow IMG tags to use .JPG .GIF or whatever...
**PROBLEM ONLY**
I have this configured only for .JPG file uploads, so for things like .GIF and .PNG WONT work at all!  unless there is another workaround for that, I'm sorry!  I suppose you could add more lines to the rewrite code to allow .gif and .png extensions for the same, and then modify a script for the bbcode display to detect filetype & show relevant url??  i dont know
Via the .htaccess file, I am doing testing this now on my webasite, and it seems to work!
If you haven't already created a .htaccess file, do so in the ROOT of your forums...
then add this
   RewriteEngine On  
   RewriteBase /  
   RewriteRule ^album_pic_([0-9]*).jpg album_pic.php?pic_id=>
   RewriteRule ^album_pic_([0-9]*).jpg album_pic.php?pic_id=$1 [L,NC] < [L,NC] 
RewriteBase is the location of where the forum is, so if it is /phpbb then it should be /phpbb (i think)
I'm still new to the whole .htaccess idea, but it does work!