Thank you for all the tips. What I did do was to reduce quality using "Faststone". Even at 640x480 the size came to 245 KB. However, after seeing your reply I tried Nero; and I stepped down from 2536x1932 to 800x600 to get a picture size of 193 KB.
It was as a last resort that I cropped while using Faststone.
Thank you for taking all the trouble
A.S.Chandrashekaran