Yuck! Blotchy Overcompressed photos

What happened to the photos on photo.net? Is it just me? Is it just

my computer for some unknown reason? I just went on today and all

the photos look absolutely horrendous. It looks like someone went

through the photos and compressed at the highest compression ratio

ever created for jpg file saving. Every photo looks like it is made

of little digital cubes. Help!

Do you have an URL to a photo you find overcompressed? I see no noticable difference from yesterday on the photos I viewed. Remember that different picture compress differently. Some turn out quite bad even with marginal compression.

 

(OT: And I don't think that they were compressed at "the highest compression ration ever created for jpg" since Photo.Net uses ImageMagick which would give truly horrendous results :-) These four images originally created for a swedish forum shows the original image, compressed with lowest quality in PS Elements and two samples with REALLY low quality settings created with ImageMagick. Just for reference.)<div></div>

It's happening to me also, for no apparent reason, but it's true for every jpeg in every site, not just PN. At least in my case.

If you are using a service such as Earthlink, they have some acceleration proxy software that recompresses images on the fly, between you and the page that is serving the pictures, to give the effect that the "Internet is going faster." The drawback is the quality of the images is drastically reduced.

Bob is correct. I discovered that it was a user-definable setting that allows web pages to load faster at the cost of picture quality.