wow. LOL. interesting story.
Gmanjoe, a word of advice. try to save those images in PNG format or at least GIF since both are lossless compression. PNG preferably since its a 24 bits lossess image codec while GIF is an 8 bits lossless codec. Also, PNG is more an efficient lossless compressor than GIF.
Unless, it\'s a picture with lot of variation of colors, then lossy compressor like JPEG is more efficient at reducing the image size, but at the cost of degration.