Decrease Bitmap Effect On Swf Size?

[Noodle]

I'm in the midst of making Author Bios for a project I'm organizing.
To make them look good, I'm using images directly from the artists userpages.
The bad thing is, I'm only 3/10 users in, and already looking at 630kb in size!

This is just the menu! Only a fraction of the menu in fact!
I know all this bulky weight on my .swf is coming from the bitmaps.
I've been tracing them so they keep their original quality (Modify -> Bitmap -> Trace Bitmap)
If I don't do that they look terrible.

What can I do to make a significant decrease to what they add to the file size, while still letting them look good?

[regulargabs]

Did you try to import the images as pngs? They look decent when I do that, and the file is alot smaller. Flash loves png since it worked pretty well with macromedia fireworks png integration, I guess they keeped that.

[EKublai]

I don't think trace bitmap would work well in this case. But to clarify, are these jpegs or bmps since you can trace bitmap a jpeg too. Pics will tend to spike the file size regardless.

If you have photoshop export the images at different numbers. Or you can open it in MS Paint and hit save. The result will be slightly degraded but the size will plummet.

[Noodle]

They are actually JPEG. I just said Bitmap because that was what the trace function was called.

I'll try saving them as a few different kinds of files types, see what difference it makes.
Thanks

[Noodle]

I redid the pictures without tracing them, and found a setting that changes the overall JPEG quality for the exportion of the movie.

The final size WAS 1470kb
Its NOW 331kb

Thanks guys!
You saved me a ridiculous amount of unnecessary file size gain!