Oh yes, libraries. If you have recent versions of libjpeg, libtiff, zlib, libpng (and possibly one or two others), you should be good to go, especially for web stuff. Basically speaking, if you can get <a href="http://www.helixcode.com/">Helix Code</a> GIMP to work, a recent version of ImageMagick should work too. I've never had problems. Rolling your own (i.e., compiling) is different story though...

Good luck.