Downloaded artwork file sizes - can be HUGE!

Question

Just so you know....
Artwork files downloaded from the Apple site can be HUGE. For example, artwork for "Travis - The Invisible Band" is a JPEG of 1.35 megabytes despite being only a 600x600 pixel image. It's hard to discover just how big these files are - most people won't relaise! They are hidden in Music:iTunes:Artwork in a cryptically named set of folders. I got Disk Inventory X to help find the bigger ones, then used it's reveal in Finder option to view them by dragging onto Graphic Converter's icon.
Having lots of artwork of this size really chews into your hard disk. The average size seems to be around 400k. 4,000 mp3's might mean 1,000 images or about half a gig of disk space. These files will be attached to your mp3 files reducing available space on your iPod by about 10% for 128M mp3's.
The same 1.3M image file can be reduced to 160k in Graphic Converter at the same pixel size without meaningful visual degradation, and to only 40k at 300x300 pixels. An iPod that might lose up to 10% of its capacity with large artwork files would see almost no loss of capacity with more compact artwork.
I've figured out an applescript that will reduce the image file size to whatever I want (using Graphic Converter). It puts a smaller version as a jpg on the desktop. Unfortunately applescript can't insert jpg files into iTunes, it's only permitted to add them after conversion to PICT files. Who knows why! PICT files are much larger than jpg files, so I can't make the script nearly as useful as it should be - annoying indeed. If it was not for this, a script that automatically went through iTunes and shrunk large artwork would definitely be feasible.
Even more surprising, I found that if you drag a jpg image direct from Safari into iTunes, it does not go in as a jpg! Apple change it to a high-quality PNG in transit, and the file size goes up by a factor of 5 to 6 if the original jpg was well-compressed to start with. The only way to ensure that the original (compact) jpg file gets into iTunes is to drag it from Safari to the desktop, and then manually drag that jpg into iTunes.
Apple should perhaps have paid a little more attention to file size issues with artwork. Before providing such huge artwork files for download they might have provided options for size (300x300 vs 600x600) and quality (medium vs high). Also they should leave dragged jpg's alone.
This has spoiled my iTunes 7 experience somewhat. Otherwise it's great.
Chris.

Answer 1

while Coverflow may be a delightful treat for the eyes,
i've contested since day-one that the artwork bloats
the song files to an unacceptable size... for me, anyway.
many months ago, i decided to endure the task of
deleting the song art from ALL my song files, and to
my absolute surprise, i got back hundreds of MBs
of space on my hard drive.
so now, obviously, whenever i purchase any new music,
the first thing i do after up/downloading is delete
the song art. it's all pretty, but i didn't buy an iPod to
look at the song art.
my two cents! cheers!