[Brajeshwar]

> I know some people use S3 services for hosting images, but then you have to worry about generating your own thumbnails etc. and it's trickier.

This is one reason why I started asking, “Is this image really needed for this article.” As for the thumbnail generation, I used to have a few Photoshop actions that I just click and be done with.

Now, I just manually optimize the few images I uses in such a way that it is somewhere in the middle -- CSS can still shrink it as a thumbnail but the original isn't that too large either. Something like that.

If you still maintain that a popular website to worry about images that much, I would try out CloudFlare image service.