I have my quality settings set at 85%, but noticed that my file size on my computer and on my server are identical. I've experimented with FTP and the direct upload, but see no difference. I would have expected that the images are compressed somewhere on their way to my album - what good does it do to display them with a lesser quality if the actual file size is still as huge as it's always been?

I've been trying to find info about what the best way to upload images is regarding image size, quality, and download speed. Some of my viewers are on dial-up. Has anyone figured out a good system to get decent quality pics that don't take forever to load?

Zenphoto resizes images to be displayed on the theme's image.php if the full image size (of the image you upload) is bigger than the image size setting. If it is smaller the full image is shown without processing.

This image processing happens once if the image is first visited and then it is served from cache. The first processing may take some time depending on the full image size and the speed of your server etc.

Anyway, 85% is quite a high value and less compression, so set it lower to get smaller images. Better even if you don't upload too big images in the first place.

What acrylian is saying is that the resizing happens only the files stored in the cache, not to the ones you upload.