There are no dumb questions, only people who have not read the manual. :-)
Ryan, you have probably figured out that the "pictures.phtml" is the filename for the page in your example.
Everything to the right of the question mark is called a "query string." In a query string, you can pass information along that can be decoded and acted upon by scripts.
By convention, variable names and values are passed as name=value pairs, separated by ampersands when necessary.
PHP automatically parses the query string, decodes the information it finds there, and parks the results in variables that are globally available.
Your example would create two variables, named $pics and $pg.
This code:
<? echo "pics is $pics and pg is $pg"; ?>
... would produce this output:
pics is rob and pg is 1
Armed with that background, go read the manual thoroughly and start writing and testing code. It is not hard and the computer has a way of correcting you when you make mistakes.
