Image-based applications such as remote surveillance, environmental monitoring, and robotic navigation are often bandwidth-limited, and benefit from image down- sampling or compression. Often a decision is made without considering the relative impact on the functional goal of the monitoring of the different down-sampling and/or compression choices. In this paper, we use a specific "remote" monitoring application - the distinction between images of authentic products and counterfeit products - to assess the impact of down-sampling and compression on the classification accuracy of the counterfeit detection imaging software.