Image intensive site, workarounds.

I'm putting together a site for an artist, so it's filled with images.

Problem is that after including only 10 .jpgs of maximum width/ bredth 300 pixels (40 compression) I am already up to 300K in filesize, which is one minute download time for those on a 56K modem, and thus unexceptable.

Would the workaround be to make every one of those images a .swf movie and load seperately? Or is there a more practical way?

Another thing, adjusting the jpg quality settings in the publish settings doesn't appear to do jack, even setting the .jpg quality to zero doesn't affect the filesize, or the quality of the .jpgs for that matter, is that normal?

If you're happy enough to ask the user to have a version 6 Flash Player to view your site you can use the loadMovie() action (in Flash 5 or MX) to load JPGs directly into a movieClip or level. The only problem is (from your point of view as the developer) if you are using Flash 5, you probably won't be able to see the JPGs when you test it ... this is a Flash PLAYER 6 feature, and as the stand-alone Flash Player included with Flash 5 is also version 5, it can't use loadMovie in this way. However, as I said before, if you ask that your user has the Flash Player 6 installed in their browser it will work regardless of whether the SWF was made in v5 or MX. You can test it yourself in your browser - it's just a pain in the ass when you're developing.

As for the quality question ... look in your library at the imported JPGs - right click and choose PROPERTIES - you can override the imported quality with the document PUBLISH settings. You can also set individual qualities, if you want some to appear sharper than others.

Or get Flix. It can batch convert hundreds of images to swf's at the time.
As a bonus it makes swf's of Quicktime movies too ( even playable in F3).