some tech questions from an idiot

how big (in pixels) is the picture?

what format is it currently in?

who's the image for?

i used to get sent a lot of pictures taken on megapixel cameras that were thousands of pixels by thousands of pixels and, well, anything above 800x600 is too large for my monitor and a waste of download time. so if it's just a snapshot for friends then resize it to something sensible save it as a jpg.

they are jpegs, done on a small digital camera, intended as "art", see here

http://photobucket.com/albums/v430/anthonyseaston/

anthony, not sure if this is completely correct but I saved your fourth pic, which was 944kb, and it appeared to be a .bmp file not a jpeg.
i then just loaded it up in another paint package and saved it as a jpeg which became 21kb in size. i didnt notice much loss in quality.

then you're stuck 8)

those you linked to are about the file size you can expect given the size of the image. and are all about 250k, a quarter of the 1000k you mention in your post. i'm sensing i didn't quite answer the question you were asking 8)

i don't like the pixelation in those photos. the guage on the meter particularly looks a bit ropey. what size were the pictures you took and how did you resize them?

but koogs i think the files are .bmp files not .jpg files as anthony stated, they may just have been renamed as jpeg files (somehow I'm not sure). As I stated I managed to get the 944kb file to 21kb just by saving it as a jpeg and didn't notice any loss in quality.

Here is the link to the saved version

(i couldn't download them as bmp files or, indeed, anything else but i'll take your word for it. i wonder what software he's using?)

i think the bigger problem is either the initial image or the way they've been rescaled. i'm guessing the camera doesn't take them with such odd dimensions so it's either something anthony's doing or the something that photobucket are doing. for best quality i take them at the highest res my camera will handle (which isn't much, these days) and then resize them in photoshop / gimp *using cubic or bilinear* resampling (rather than closest fit or whatever). then save them with >75 quality.