With many ancestors in a few villages, it may be worthwile to download and resize batches of images from the "Historical Record Collections" of FamilySearch.

One reason could be you want to store images with a smaller resolution in your database.

Another reason could be thumbnails, they are faster to browse and smaller to keep in local storage for future previews. Thumbnails allow to recognize covers, lists and other types of pages. Once the batch completes you can do the actual research with less images to examine one by one in full detail. Short notes may also speed up the next search.

This project provides a few tools for these purpose, the wiki suggests how to use this tool in combination with other tools.

Screenshot: http://fs-thumbs.googlecode.com/svn/wiki/screenshot.png' width='600'>