Help Desk
By Jack Szwergold, guest Webmaster
Recompressed Images in AOL
My company recently outsourced a Web site with lots of images for one of our clients. The images display fine with Netscape and Internet Explorer on both PCs and Macs. However, when they're viewed by AOL users, some of them look horrible—they have a strange watercolor effect. All of the images are RGB JPEGs that were optimized in Photoshop. AOL says this is a problem with compression, and users need to go into the browser's Preferences menu and choose not to optimize. Is this or is this not an AOL problem?
—Rebecca
The short answer is that AOL is right. Users should disable image compression so that AOL's system doesn't recompress the images.
However, the long answer is that to speed up download times, AOL recompresses almost all image files and saves them into their proprietary ".art" format. By default, this applies to all BMP, GIF, JPEG, and Progressive JPEG files between 1KB and 8MB in size (AOL doesn't recompress animated GIFs).
So what does this mean for your designers? Well, you can encourage users to disable image compression in the AOL browser. But, most people probably won't know they need to do that until it's too late and they've already seen the distorted (recompressed) images. There are a couple of steps you can take to avoid this. First, AOL servers will occasionally choke on a thumbnail and resave an image with color bands or black blocks in it.
