I apologize if this has been asked before, but Google and a forum search turned nothing up. I've also looked around on VersionTracker for something to take care of this.
The thumbnails in OS X are nice, but take up too much space! I downloaded a 1K image and it promptly ballooned to 115K as soon as it hit my hard drive. A lot of space is being wasted by this. It's a real 115K too, since when I uploaded it to my iDisk it said uploading 115K and took a while. I tried deleting the icon in the Get Info window and that did nothing.
I use Internet Explorer, and it does this with all images downloaded from the web. As an example, try downloading this picture in IE and doing a "Get Info" on it.
It might be possible to blame M$ for this, but it is also exhibited in pictures I grab from my digicam and other sources. What annoying bloat! On the good side, OmniWeb and Mozilla don't do this.