First, you need a good 'Image Editor'. It's simply a program which can resize, crop (trim), reduce quality and most importantly, change 'file extension (image type) of any image, among many other nifty things. Your standard MS Paint® program is useful, but it has many limitations and is not really good for 'editing' images in real sense. For my money, which is somewhere around 'free', you can't go wrong with 'Irfanview'.

Irfanview is an excellent 'Freeware' Image Editor which can be downloaded and installed through their website [url]http://www.irfanview.com[/url]. In my opinion, only thing it can't do is change file extension of an 'animated gif' (the moving images that you see everywhere), which I think is beyond almost any program.

Now you're armed with what you need to make your images work for you, instead of you building your website around your images and their 'foibles'. If you have a bitmap image that is 500 Kb, you can turn it into a jpeg of approximately 25 percent of file size, or even smaller, there are many variables. In some cases, gif and png files can be even smaller than that. You can make file even more manageable by reducing quality of image by, say 10 percent (hardly noticeable in many cases) and cut file size by up to 30 percent again.

You can crop (trim) edges or parts of image, which don't need to be shown to reduce file size. You can convert to 'grayscale' (a black and white photo type image) if color isn't too important and save a lot of file size. You can reduce physical size of image (although it won't change file size, it can make your images fit where they don't want to), keeping original ratio of length to width or 'stretching'. You can even 'capture images' (take screenshots).

You can also invert and reverse, turn 90 degrees left or right etc. Basically, if you can conceive of it, within reason, you can do it. So hopefully, now many beginners and budding webmasters won't be a slave to their images any longer, accepting less than they really want because they have to cater for characteristics of an image. Now images will speak a thousand words, instead of taking a thousand years to load.