Here is an easy way to reduce photos in Linux .. I tried with Ubuntu 10.04 .
Install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Go to the folder where the images are located,
cd /home/user/Pictures/folder
Now enter the following command.
mkdir resized; for f in *jpg; do convert -resize 30% $f resized/$f; done
Its done, All images will be reduced within a few seconds.