Is there any code or library out there that can help me scale down an image? If you take a picture with the iPhone, it is something like 2000x1000 pixels which is not very n
See http://vocaro.com/trevor/blog/2009/10/12/resize-a-uiimage-the-right-way/ - this has a set of code you can download as well as some descriptions.
If speed is a worry, you can experiment with using CGContextSetInterpolationQuality to set a lower interpolation quality than the default.