I'm writing my thesis in LaTeX, generating it with pdflatex. I have a large number of figures, many of which are bitmaps (as opposed to SVG) in PNG/JPEG format. I've generally created them to be fairly high resolution (say 1600x1200-ish) to ensure that whatever size they end up in the document, they'll be at least 300dpi when printed.

As I'm writing/laying out the document, I'm including graphics (using \includegraphics from the graphicx package) and setting widths/heights as appropriate (e.g. subfigures are quite small). I don't need the images to be any more than about 300 dpi at best, so where I have shrunk a 1600x1200 image down to say 5cm, the image is now at 800 dpi. So despite including some very small (on the page) images, the PDF is becoming quite large.

Is there a way to tell pdflatex or graphicx (or something else involved?) to convert all images to a maximum of 300 dpi, based on the dimensions I'm setting with say \includegraphics[width=2in]{filename}? i.e. so it scales the image to a max of 600x600 pixels as it includes it in the PDF (leaving the original file untouched).

I know I can resize the original images with various command line applications, and include the pre-resized versions, but given the images vary in size considerably, it wouldn't be as simple as making sure they're all 300dpi for a constant printed size. It'd also be nice to be able to easily create different versions of PDFs (web vs final print) without resizing images manually, so that the 'web' PDF capped images at say 72-100 dpi while the final print one could cap at 600 (if at all).