Taking photos and posting them on my site

Doing this for the first time and need basic advice

[serengeti]

I have a simple html based TEXT ONLY website right now. I want to take some photographs and post them on the site.

I have a digital camera to do this.

My main concern is the clarity of the pictures and the size of the pictures once they are on the webpage (I want to probably put three pictures on one page for now). I do not want links on the site to take browsers to the actual pictures -- I want to have the pictures right there on this one particular page.

I also don't think I have any software on my computer to crop and resize the pics. Any good freeware out there to do this?

Can any experienced people give me advice on how to go about this in terms of saving the pics as jpg,jpeg, gif etc... I want to save space, but also want relatively clear looking pictures (clear enough for say someone to see a persons acne!). Will I be able to save them with any of these extensions or will the freeware I get possibly have some default extension like .jpg that I cannot change?

Any other advice for a beginner would be appreciated. Thanks.

[ytswy]

Bring out the GIMP [gimp.org].