Image uploading is almost always a TON slower than downloading. Upload bandwidth usually costs quite a bit more than it's download counterpart. Honestly there isn't much you can do about it, unless you want to consider buying broadband internet.
One other option is to compress your images more before uploading. This of course is at a loss of quality.
Resize your images to 640 x 480 and they will load faster. Don't let photobucket resize for you though, the quality goes way down. I use irfanview and run a batch conversion for images that I will be using on the web.