"The city went absolutely stark raving mad with new building regulations, which I got embroiled in. After a YEAR of dickering with getting plans approved, the room finally got built over a new garage, but it cost me over TWICE as much as it would have if it was built before the earthquake."

Well... but hopefully that means it's safe where maybe before it wouldn't 've been??

"-I did re-size them to 1024x768 at 72dpi, but they are still relatively big, and I can't bring myself to use the jpeg compression in Photoshop at anything less than "8 or 9"."

Do it! Compress it to 11!! Don't compress the 'originals', but there's people with several detailed/good looking shots up using AVSforum's tiny amount of free space. Just for computer viewing you can really make the photos TINY.