I have several pictures that I want to be textures for the ground in ZE and they start as JPEGs. Besides GIMP, does Paint or Photoshop work to turn them to TGAs? Because I've tried both and they don't work. Here's the image:

Now this isn't the acutal size I used. I tuned it down to 512x512 and I saved it as a 24 bit and named it dirt_sand_road.tga.

I put it in my world1 folder for my mod and opened ZE. I went to textures, tried to use it, and the texture shows up as a default blank texture. So it isn't reading it. Solution?

First of all, if you put in the world1 folder while ZE was opened, ZE won't read it until you close ZE and reopen it again.
Second of all, check that when you're saving the texture, that the box marked "RLE Compression" is unchecked.

It was not opened while I put it in the folder. For now, I'm editing this photo from Paint and when I save it, there is no box that says RLE compression. That must be in Photoshop. So can I even use Paint, or must I use some other image software?

You can't save TGAs in paint. You need to use GIMP or PhotoShop.
Try GIMP. It's not that hard.

Alright, but honestly, I don't have room on this crap computer, so I'll do it at school. Thanks for all your help!