tas-- The stuff here from Photoshop (v7) all uses JPEG "3" (LOW). I'm sure any artifacts would be less with less compression. That is really one of the interesting conclusions about this exercise; one can really torture the images guite a lot before running into visible problems. [BTW, as far as I know, the value "3" is completely arbitrary, and is certainly different from program to program. In making comparisons it is better to use compression ratio. In my examples, 260K images were compressed down to about 40K.] Your point above was really the relevant one, with Photoshop: "Rotate before Cropping" for best results. Many of the programs at the link are FREE, (and some even claim lossless cropping). Can't hurt to have in the bag of tricks. Star-- I think I may take a vacation from doing tutorials. I will package up the individual photos (into tables), and mail them to you. I don't know enough about the various flavors of digital camera software in order to describe the best workflow getting pics out of the camera. Maybe tas or hendrik could help with this?