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I recently bought a keg setup and my first beer that I can put in it is a pumpkin ale. I made a 6 gallon batch so I need to bottle at least a gallon, but I was planning on giving away quite a bit of this batch to family at Thanksgiving, since I can't imagine me wanting to drink 5 gallons of it just for myself. Is it ok to just fill my keg with 3 or 4 gallons? Any problems with carbonating with a non-full keg? Will it keep just as long?

As for the bottling should I try to calculate the amount of sugar to still batch prime, or just add so much sugar to each bottle? I did get a package of those sugar drop things (look like hard candies) about a year ago...I guess I could use those, but I'm not really sure how many to add per bottle.

You can partially fill, but be sure to purge really well. As far as carbonating, I've added sugar to bottles before.

The carb drops work. If they are the Coopers tabs from NG, I've used one in a grolsch bottle, two in a 500 ml or 650ml.

I usually keghowever much I want, figure out how much volume I've got left, boil up some sugar and water, mix in and bottle. If I've only got a half dozen bottles I just put a bit of sugar in each bottle, I don't remember how much specifically.

I do this all of the time. The keg actually seems to carbonate faster when it is not full. As X said, be sure to purge the keg well. Probably squeeze and dump 3-4 times. I still boil a proportionate amount of water/sugar and batch prime no matter how small a quantity of beer I am bottling. I used the carb drops before with disastrous results (probably my fault, although I still can't figure out why.)

Sweet thanks for all the replies!