Hi Deborah,
The comment code won't cause a problem. You can leave it or delete it, your choice. The HTML comments look like this: <!-- comment -->
I'd actually thought about testing the template with single center column and a narrower top picture. You can see the following code on the picture:
width=700 height=500
try:
width=490 height=350
I didn't check the actual size of the lower picture (wide one), but that's pretty close. However, the very bottom 4 pictures might also need resizing or regrouping, as they are each 200 wide (total 800pix across).
Resizing the border strips would probably not look so great.
Danno