Photo & product page questions

I need to make some changes to the layout of my product pages and the things I want to do cannot be done in the dashboard.

I use the "left" orientation for my product pages, and this setting puts all of my photos underneath the main image. I would like to keep the left orientation, but have all additional images immediately to the right of the main image.
Right now, the additional images that are below the main image are spaced pretty far apart if I just add one extra image and the more I add, the closer they come together.

But say I just want to have one or two additional photos and would like them placed pretty tightly together -- how would I go about doing this?

Here's a perfect example of how I want the images in my product pages to display. How can I achieve this look?

- Also, I remember changing the setting on my photos to "no borders" somewhere, but my photos all still display with black borders. Why would this happen, and how can I change it so that I really have no borders?

- And finally, Where is the compression setting located within product cart? My images are badly compressed and look blurry on my website even though they are great quality. How can I  change this?

I installed the "bulk uploader" from WMS but have not used it to upload anything yet. They have a compression setting, which I have set to 100 (meaning best photo quality) but this setting seems to make no difference - is this because I am not using the bulk uploader for my photos?

Can someone please tell me how to change the compression setting within product cart?

Thanks!!

Thanks Hamish, I didn't realize that there was any other way to get images on my site besides using the upload/resize option!?  (well, at least before I added the WMS add-on)

Thanks for answering this part of my question. I am saving my images in Photoshop at 480 X 640 - "save for web" optimized. When I use the "upload and resize" function, I set my thumbnail to be 200, and the general and detail images to both be 480 (based on width, not height, and I do use the "sharpen image" option because if I don't it's a real mess of blur)
If you're wondering why I set both my general and detail images to be the same size, it's because when I used to save my images at 960 width and then try to have my detail setting at 960, it would never actually display at the size I had entered (960) anyway, so I figured why bother. 

Thanks for telling me where to find the quality setting. What is the MAX I can set it to? You mentioned that it should be at 85 right now? Does it only go up to 100? That's what I am guessing.

You mentioned this "If you do then it depends which software component on theserver is being invoked as to exactly how the image is processed."
But I can't figure out what you mean by this...sorry, can you clarify or elaborate? Thanks!