The webserver I was working on was running out of space only to find people had been uploading anywhere from 3Mb to 9MB jpeg images. Nobody needs that kind of image size and quality on the wordpress site.
Put together a script to for find and re-encode jpeg images over a certain size, to a lower quality setting.
find . -type f -size +1000k -name “*.jpg” -exec mogrify -quality 50 {} \;