Oh wise ones ....

I am an Image::Magick newbie, and have a question for those who may be familiar with the program/module.

I've searched the monastery to no avail, but did notice that some of the results/comments indicated that the ImageMagick "proper" documentation is, well, lame (and I think I'd have to agree).

I'm trying to produce thumbnails, and the code that follows is working .... my goal is to produce a page of *light weight* on-the-fly thumbnails (that link to the full size image). The full size images are pretty light to start with (800 X 600 pixel gif's that average 25K to 50K). What I've found is (using the code below), if the thumbnails are resized to 1/4 (or less) of the original size, the image weight is always less then the original. If, however, I resize the image to half the original size, the thumbnail weight is often *double* the original.

This makes me think that maybe I'm missing some sort of compression issue in my code, 'cause it sure seems to me that a smaller version of the original should be lighter-weight then the original. Am I missing something, or is the thumbnail idea only appropriate when the reduction is greater then 1/4 the original? (BTW: linux/apache setup)

sub MakeThumb {
    my $src = Image::Magick->new;
    $src->Read("$impath/$file");
        #grab size
    my ($width, $height) = $src->Get('width', 'height');
        #reduce size
    $width = $width/$div;
    $height = $height/$div;
        # Create the thumbnail based on reduced size
    my ($thumb,$x,$y) = create($src,$width,$height);
        # Save thumbnail to file(CH this works)
    $thumb->Write("$file");
    print qq~<img src="$imurl/$file" width="$width" height="$height" b
+order="0"><br>~;
        #get rid of temp file
    unlink ("$file") or die "can't unlink $file!\n";
}
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