.gif images & thumbnailing (easy question)

[yayvb]

Hi everyone,

I have a freelance programmer who has created a photo upload section for my profile. One limitation is that I noticed that the thumbnails take forever to load and are sometimes like 140k for one 100x100 thumbnail.

I asked him to please thumbnail them the proper way, and he says that those are .gif images which GD2 won't touch. I have search results now so if there are 10 people you may have to download 1mb before the page is done loading, maybe even more since some photos are larger.

My question: is there any way that my programmer can have all images thumbnailed to save bandwidth, etc. or is the programmer correct in making the thumbnails just reduced in image size but untouched in file size for .gif?