I may be way off base with this, but have you tried "Simple Image
Resizer"? To find it in Synaptic (etc.) you need to add a PPA to your
Third Party sources, as below, and refresh. It can then be found in
the file listings by the name above. It works very well for multiple
files for me and there are many ways to set it up.

One caution, the default file type is "bw" (black and white?), which
is probably not the one you are working with but there are many, many
other formats in the dropbox. You can choose files or directories and
select the ones you need to resize. The output directory can be
selected and also a prefix to distinguish the compressed files from
the originals. The filename, in case you want to start from the CLI,
is sir.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/rsachetto/ppa/ubuntu lucid main (replace
lucid with your version name)

b&w would be a problem.

Ill have to check that out.

Please let us know if it works for you...

Ok. That works better than dealing with permissions.
It resizes based on w x h where I was resizing based on
size of file. If it was 1mb I scaled down to say 25kb.

Ill use this today since I have to get moving on these files
but I still want to figure out this permission issue so
my scripts can just run.

Are there any spaces or %20s in the filenames?

No.

The games are all like DSC_2208.jpg or HPWM254.JPG and the first thing I do is
with a php script, rename all the ones in a folder to
name_of_performance_001.jpg making all the endings all the same. Then if they
are too large I used another script that resizes down to under 30kb. I think I
figured it out through. If I make a copy of the image and resize that there isnt
a problem but, if I resize the original image then I have to change the
permissions.

I dont remember having to do this before but, Im doing it inside www this time
instead of from my own file directory.