I'd really suggest following halley's suggestion to not use tables, but in response to the last question:

Also, is there any way to resize images WITHOUT Image::Magic or the GD library?

There are plenty of ways, but they're not all scriptable. I've lately been using sips, but ImageMagick is more cross-platform. (and sips won't handle gifs in MacOS 10.3)

There are also programs like GraphicConverter, GIMP, Photoshop, etc.