Nope! GD supports jpeg just fine... At least, this works for me:

use GD;

open(IMAGE, 'foo.jpg') 
    or die("Can't open foo.jpg: $!");

my $im = newFromJpeg GD::Image(IMAGE) 
    or die("Can't create image from foo.jpg: $!");

my ($w,$h) = $im->getBounds();

close(IMAGE);

print "foo.jpg is $w x $h\n";
^d
foo.jpg is 1024 x 768
[download]

I guess it might help if our GD-using-AM-poster ran the script from console first, or at least used CGI::Carp instead of just reporting the 500 error... That way we might actually know what the error was, and not just know that there was an error. Oh well, the above works fine for me.

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!