Yep, that can definitely be right, and they can be much larger if you don't keep track of your image parameters.
There is a table of acceptable file sizes at the bottom of the file upload window. Max for a jpg is 244K.
Your existing pictures are probably still usable if you downsize them a bit (a lot in your case). One easy-to-use program to do that is
IrfanView. I use it all the time to resize either the image size or the file size. It works great for both functions, and many more.