Ok, consider me officially Impressed
As I've been adding images to the posts more and more I've usually used print screen to grab them from google maps or creative commons on flickr and the Irfanview to crop and resize them as required. I've been saving them all in .png.
I'm not sure why but the picture quality was always good and the image sizes were't too large. But then recently I've been trying for larger and larger images in the posts (because they're purty) and the sizes have ballooned.
In Irfanview there's a menu option called save for web. I never bothered with it before as it requires you download a 5Meg plugin and I really couldn't be bothered.
It shows you a comparison of how the picture looks now versus how it will look after compression with a choice of different file formats. My 400K picture of outer Mongolia dropped to 100K. The same with the stormy clouds over the hills of Murcia.
All with no noticeable drop in picture quality. I am very impressed. Here's a sample of a before and after, apologies for the large image size.
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