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.