This is a good discussion to be having. Thanks for bringing it up. I like the idea of scaling down smaller photos for fast transmission. A quick solution I just thought of involves something similar to progressive JPEGs (or mipmaps), but applied to a whole photo collection. Say I have taken a series of 10 potentially incriminating photos, and my phone may be confiscated or destroyed at any moment. What I want is for all 10 photos to be sent at 1/8 size, followed immediately by them being sent at 1/4 size, then 1/2 size and finally at full size. So if I have enough time, all of the photos will be sent in full detail. But if I am interrupted, at least I will have transferred a low-resolution version of each photo. The total bandwidth is less than double the full photo size. Also, at risk of being yelled at for suggesting proprietary technology, I feel I should mention that the Google+ app has this feature. (Not the progressive resolution feature, but the automatic uploads.) You can set it so that every photo you take on the phone is automatically uploaded to a special Google+ album that is private to only you, and from there, you can choose to download or publish the photos. It's pretty cool, but obviously we would prefer a free software solution.