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Kindles will display the images, you probably mean they just look terrible. Mostly true, in my experience. But it is usually the fault of the image itself, or how it is coded, GIGO. How can publishers be so bad at this??? Often the images in the text are awful, but the ads are great, how about that! Maybe that's author versus publisher.
I keep everything in Calibre as epub only...partly for ease of editing, also because I have multiple devices, and yes, to save space.
If I get a new book, say a novel from Amazon, that is several megabytes large, it's usually due to many and/or huge images, and sometimes fonts. So I automatically edit these books. I take out unwanted images, especially ads, and also any font files (your choice, I'm happy with my reader's fonts). Keep important images like the cover, maps, stuff that is story-helpful or just pleasant.
Then I use the compression tool (Tools->Compress images losslessly), but I tick the box that says 'Enable lossy compression' and set it to 50. That results in a huge compression for jpg files, and I absolutely can't see any difference in viewing on a Kindle or a Kobo. A bad image stays bad, but a good image still looks good. Yes, I've degraded the images, but if I can't tell on my reader...so what?
I usually do a lot more, but if you just want to cut the size, it takes about one minute to open the editor, use the font manager to remove fonts, use the compression tool, save and exit. Typical novel that starts at 4.5mb usually drops to between .4 and .6 -- unless it is just a huge book in text, like over 1,000 pages.
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