Jetpack updates are generally welcome, but this one is just downright great. Shared hosts are notoriously bad at handling large images. Why? They have a severely low memory limit that essentially cripples WordPress and any image manipulation it wants to do.
Photon Your Images
Have you ever switched themes to find that full-width images break out of the layout and no longer fit your theme? Are you frustrated that images on your blog take too long to load? Jetpack Photon fixes all of that by making the advanced image acceleration and image editing service from WordPress.com available to the broader WordPress community, essentially making every image a fully dynamic object that themes and plugins can transform to their heart’s content without killing your server. In fact, if you enable Photon, you will see your CPU and bandwidth usage plummet as images are served through the global WordPress.com cloud, meaning less load on your host and faster images for your users.
I’ll be looking into this for The-Nexus at least. We serve some really huge images over there for album art, because quality looks nice.