---

It may be that the next version of the content management system has a solution for these wider images, but still I'd prefer the smaller size (pixel-wise). I am not certain how that would work out, but Firefox has a nice image zoom extension that will allow you to increase the size of images as they are displayed. On higher resolution images I have used this succesfully to see more details but also to reduce some blownup images in size because images that do not have enough resolution to be blown up can actually show more detail when they are decreased in size.
Don't worry about the server load yet. I only notice the problem when I am making my backups on a local hard drive, but since that backup is incremental I only notice each image once.