Profile pictures : why so ugly ?

[baptisteplace]

Profile picture are really really ugly, it really as annoying as the rest of the site really nice and professional.

So why SeoMoz use a very high compression rate ? Bandwidth should not be a problem. The site is slow but only for generating the page content, not downloading the assets.

[oneticsoft]

That's your point of view, everyone sets his picture and that picture needs to have a standart resolution and dimensons, abbout compression it will be slower if not compressed in your case, i don't feel or see any loading problems :), and bandwith it is all about bandwidth you cant afford flood or/and uncompressed content, there are other users who hasn't a good download connection and uncompressed content is a problem for them or have a limited download

[Tom-Anthony]

I can't say I had noticed the profile images had particularly high compression. With the right images they seem quite detailed. I don't think you should worry too much about them.

[baptisteplace]

Well I posted this after seeing the photo of Hannah Smith on her blog post :

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/information-architecture-faceted-navigation-duplicate-content-oh-my

I have to say that my own picture was taken with very good camera and it looks really bad on seoMoz.

Also I'm on a mac and the screen quality is really good, on regular PC screens this is not the same.

[Tom-Anthony]

Did you scale your photo yourself before uploading, or let SEOmoz do it for you? My profile image is quite sharp, but I have it pre-scaled to different sizes (nicely, from Lightroom/Photoshop so the sharpening is nice) so I uploaded it at approximately the right size. Your's looks a bit blurry, but maybe you uploaded a really big image?

As for the screen - it depends what monitor people are using...

Just an idea. Either way - I still suggest we all stop worrying about it.

[baptisteplace]

Oh this is not worrying me, for sure. I just want to warn the SEOMoz staff about this difference of quality between the site design (and content) and the profile picture. No reason for such bad image quality.

I do agree with you, I did upload a big image, but this should not be the solution to have a sharp looking picture...

[Tom-Anthony]

I agree that you should be able to upload a big image, but unfortunately most of the libraries I've seen for doing backend image manipulation don't do a great job scaling down large images. They often end up blurry.

Whereas a good graphics program will sharpen properly and you'll end up with a much better looking image.

Would be interesting to see if yours looks better if you upload a pre-scaled one.