Here's a really really easy way to shrink the size of an image.
1) take the photo with your digital camera
2) transfer it to your computer (this assumes Windows not Mac, not sure if this works on mac)
3) now with the photo saved as a file on your computer, open it
4) now hit "Ctrl-Alt-PrtSc" or, if you have a laptop like mine, I have to hit "Fn-Alt-PrtSc"
(the 'PrtSc' button, aka "Print Screen"is usually on the top row and is combined on the same key with another label like 'Insert' on my laptop. This button takes a snapshot of the top window so make sure the window that is displaying your photograph is the topmost window on your computer screen)
Okay, after you do "Ctrl-Alt-PrtSc" you just took a 'snapshot' of the window that was on the top of all the others on your computer screen, and hopefully you put your photo window on the top before hitting "Ctrl-Alt-PrtSc" (click on the title bar of the photo window to bring it to the top and/or move it a little, then don't click any other windows).
5) Now go to Start=>All Programs=>Accessories and click on the Windows 'Paint' program. The Paint program window will launch.
6) Now hit "Ctrl-V" to 'paste' the screen snapshot you took of your photo in steps 1-4 above. If it doesn't appear and you used "Ctrl-Alt-PrtSc", try "Ctrl-PrtSc", or "Fn-Alt-PrtSc" in step 4 above until you can get your photo to appear in 'Paint' by hitting Ctrl-V.
7) when you successfully paste your photo into the Paint program, use the 'erase' or the selection rectangle in the Paint program to trim your photo in Paint so all you see is the photo and not the title bar, status bar, menu bar of the window that originally held your photo. (This is for neatness and is optional. Even if you don't do this clean up, your original photo file size is gonna shrink bigtime.)
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Now select 'File->Save' in Paint to save your image to a new file. I usually keep the same name as the photo's file but add "_smallFile" at the beginning to remind me it's a shrunken copy of an original photo file.
I use the above to shrink a 1 megabyte image to 100kbytes or less.
My camera made a .jpg file of size 1.42 megabytes for a side-shot photo of my bike.
Using the Paint program process above, it shrunk to 82.3K bytes. Huge improvement.
I've been using this homemade file-shrinker procedure for a long time to upload photos to the web and to send them as attachments. I'm sure there's other ways but the cool thing with this method is that every version of Windows has the 'Paint' program so you don't need special software to shrink images, you can do it on any computer running Windows.
To me the photos look identical. I don't know the details of why my digital camera is so inefficient in the size of the file.