Two and a half years ago, we went on one of our 3-day lighthousing trips to Southern New England. I took about 150-200 photos on this trip with my old, 2MP Fuji camera. When I got home and uploaded all these photos, I decided to make them all Bitmaps, because I'd heard they were better quality.

Now, I have 1.5GB left on a 20 or 30GB (can't remember what, but still there shouldn't be 1.5GB left on a 6-month-old computer) hard drive. I was just looking over my photos, and saw that these photos alone took up almost 600 MB of space. In comparison, my Mass. trip in '04, where I took more photos with my 3.2 MP Canon camera, takes up only 200 MB of space.

Is there any advantage to these photos being in this format? It's kind of a pain, since I have to resave them to use them on the forums, my website, etc. I don't have the original JPGs right now - they're on my old computer which stopped working (though my new one needs a few things done, and when I send it into my mom's tech guy, he's going to take all my old files off my old computer and put them on this one). The CD that I burned of the trip is only the BMPs.

If there's a great advantage to the format, then I might keep it, though the photos aren't anything SPECTACULAR either (good, not great, due to weather, equipment, and skill at the time). But I'd like to regain my HD space, too.