Maybe try compressing the pictures so that they aren't so high-res? I have a cheap little tool called Snag-it that I can open pictures with and compress the file size. I think it cost me less than $40. If you do a lot of this, it may be worth it. Snag-it is a screen capture tool, but it will open photos.

Unfortunately, picture files can get really big. I get a lot of photos or pictures that I take that are high-res off cameras. We usually like them high-res because they aren't so "grainy" but that comes at the price of them eating up a lot of memory/space.