I've got a little dilema that's been bugging me for some time. As you all are probably aware of by now, I have a fixation with Grim Fandango avatars, and I spend some time picking good images to be made into avatars (they're all large JPGs). Of course, I resize them to make them more fit to be used as avatars. Now, here's where the dilema kicks in. When I resize it and just save it "as is", it literally rexompresses and the file quality drops. To retain the original quality, I have to save it as a PNG, hiking up the file size in the process. Is there a way to resize and save a JPG image with NO further file quality reduction from the original JPG image?

Use GIMP, do your resizing, and when you save the final JPG, set the quality bar to 100.

....Oookay. Well, first of all, yeah, there's a bit of resizing involved, but there's also some cropping and stretching to make the image smaller, too. Will it work with those, as well? Also, is there a way to do this with any other image editing program that doesn't require me to compile it?

EDIT: Also, I do not know how to use that program, resize, crop, or stretch images.

You can get the pre-compiled program here, and yes, it can do all that other stuff. It's essentially an open source Photoshop.

To get your crop tool on, press Shift-C.

For resizing, go to Image->Scale image.

Ah, yes. I figured the thing out. Thanks for your help! ^_^