Hi,
1. They are not too big on my end:
take.ms/SDMVC
Maybe you need to refresh your CSS or something ?
2. That's because of the "force size" option. It adds white borders when the image doesn't have the required height so that it is properly centered vertically as it can't be done easily and dynamically in CSS. But then if the image is really wide, you have big "gaps" on the product page that can't be mitigated with CSS. Unfortunately, I don't have a magic bullet here to solve both issues at the same time.