I try my best to load the highest quality pictures on each of the websites I do, hockey, baseball, softball, basketball, etc. (check them out at www.paulvan.com) and each player picture I have taken thus far is kept in a JPEG format (stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, the team that developed the Internet Photo Standard) with minimal compression.  The problem is that in that uncompressed format, each shot takes between 20,000 and 35,000 pixels (Picture Elements), take a little while to load and thus, some call them J "pigs" instead of JPEGS.

Some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like AOL and Prodigy try and "help" by taking my photos and doing their own special compression on them or converting them into a less dense format.  In the case of AOL, they actually do both, converting the JPEGs into a format they call ART and it will do nearly a 10-to-one compression of the photo meaning it averages out every little group of ten pixels into a single one.  REAL FUZZY and GRAINY!

What to do?... that is if you really even want to do anything, remember the ISP's do this to speed things up for you.  They still believe the primary use of the internet is to communicate content, data, text and forms and the quality of photos is like third or fourth on their importance list.  But if this is the cause for your grainy photo and you don't mind waiting a little longer for photos to load, there is a way to change it... (and you can always change it back).

STEP 1- Make sure that the above explanation IS the problem.  Maybe the picture looks bad because I took a lousy picture, the lighting was bad, you had a bad hair day or your PC and/or monitor are not "the latest and greatest".  So first I suggest you go back to the picture in question and "right click" on it. 
Then click on "properties".  This will tell you about the picture:  
Check 3 things-
1) the address of the picture should end in .jpg
2) The TYPE of the picture should be JPG or JPEG (not ART or GIF)
3) The size should be something over 10,000 bytes
If any of these aren't true, come back here to STEP 2.
...so use your browser's "back" button to go back and check the photo.

STEP 2- Depending on the ISP you use and the version (AOL 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, etc) this may change a little but the general commands are the same.. you will be telling the ISP browser NOT TO COMPRESS graphics and photos.  I will give you the AOL commands to change... use your imagination if using a different ISP:

Older versions of AOL-:
Click MEMBER 
Click SET PREFERENCES
Click WWW
Shut off COMPRESS GRAPHICS option
Click APPLY
Click OK

Newer versions of AOL-:
Click SETTINGS 
Click PREFERENCES
Click INTERNET PROPERTIES (WWW)
Click WEB GRAPHICS
Set NEVER COMPRESS GRAPHICS option
Click APPLY
Click OK

You will need to use your browser Back button to get outta here, since I link here from every different website I build. 

Thanks,
    Mr. Van