nell - 8:23 pm on Mar 10, 2002 (gmt 0)

PHP/MySQL is a good way to go - and it's FREE. Use a hosting service with the later version of PHP (4.2) installed on the server and you can, by code, create new images from the ones stored in the database. You can specify size and JPG quality of the new image on the fly. GIFS as well as JPGs can be stored in the database.
Although images can be resized using HTML they still have the same file size and can be distorted. With PHP I can store a 200x200 78K .gif image in my database and convert it to a 85x85 .jpg at at a quality level that will give it a file size of 5K or less and it will look just fine. (A simple routine can replace the .gif in the string to .jpg before creating the new image.)