After posting to my travel blog [1] yesterday for the first time
in a while I checked the total size of the images I included
inline and found it to be a whopping 6 MB; I investigated why and
found that the quality setting on all my image variants
(*-med.jpg *-sm.jpg etc) was way too high: 99% or 100% or so.

I generate these variants using a couple additional scripts [2]
that use ImageMagick's convert program to do the actual conversion,
and I expected its default quality level to be reasonable but after
checking the documentation I see the quality level is based on
the quality of the input image, which is apparently pretty high
when shooting with canon's superfine level of compression.

I updated make_variant [2] to use more sensible quality levels,
and modified it to strip image metadata from the smallest
variants (*-sm/tn/sq.jpg files), preserving only the date/time
fields and adding copyright and comments fields a la:

   Copyright 2008 Gerald Oskoboiny, http://impressive.net/photos

   For more info about this image, licensing and technical details, see:
   http://impressive.net/people/gerald/2008/10/30/18-14-21-sm.html

These changes combined make my *sq.jpg images 75% smaller than
before, and reduced the size of the images inlined in my recent
blog post from 6 MB to 1.6 MB.

I can't believe I didn't notice this quality setting thing before...
I thought the file sizes were that big due to embedded metadata.

[1] http://impressive.net/people/gerald/blog/
[2] http://impressive.net/people/gerald/software/photo/source/make_variants
   http://impressive.net/people/gerald/software/photo/source/make_variant
   (no longer usable as-is by others because it now has a bunch
   of stuff like my name and URIs hardcoded... if anyone else uses
   this let me know and I'll add some config options)

--
Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/