I think the last is the most telling.
I'm on the third picture now. I'm patient, thanks.
Have you ever used JPEGwizard? Great program for shrinking JPEG files. Unlike others I've seen, JPEGwizard lets you adjust compression for different parts of the picture (so that on something like the airplane picture, you could have the lettering at low compression while the clouds were at higher compression).
Once upon a time, the version on their web-site was free for non-batch operation; since then, that's changed but the free one is still around if you look. I've not checked the web site lately.