Before I post any more images in the gallery I wanted to check if anyone else has had a similar experience to mine. The first image I posted was 800 pixels high. When I viewed it in the gallery it looked like someone had chewed it over and spat it out! I checked the image size and the 800 pixels was now somewhere around the 600 mark! So the system messed with my image, which explains why it looked like crap (some people might say all my pictures look like crap but that's a discussion for another day )

 I resized it so that 800 was now 600 and loaded it again and this time it looked fine. The funny thing is that this seems to be a random thing - other images I've seen hosted in the gallery from other users also look like they've been given the same treatment but then there are a few that are larger than 800 and they look fine Did I do something wrong?

Cheers,

Thorsten. 

I am working on it.... it does seem a bit random sometimes!

For now the advice would be to upload at 600 pixel by longest side as there seems to be no problems then!

Cheers

P

Hey Paul and Thorsten..

Well an observation on same... viewing an image via the gallery will present a larger image for review, looking at the same shot through RATE presents a smaller image..... Perhaps the max resolution via the rate route is limited to 500 on H or V.

So what would be the optimum, guess it depends on where reviewed.

Thorsten, have yet to see any crap from you ... where is it at lol

What I have seen in the galleries to date is for the most part brillant quality especially for the variety thats there. It seems quality not only floats to the top lol but brings out the best from us all... well I will work on it.

Jim, you're right, some of your images look like they've been through the wringer! So I did a little more investigation and after looking at several images I've found the cause of the problem and also propose a solution.

The cause:

The IMG tag used to display images in the gallery is using width and height elements to force an image into a size of 750 pixels high by 500 pixels wide. Note that this is the classic 3:2 aspect ratio of digital cameras with an APS-C sensor.

So if your image is wider than 500 pixels or higher than 750 pixels, it will be "squeezed" to fit within the 500x750 pixel frame. This is a real pain in the neck, but there is a solution which the site designers could easily implement. That solution is to create a hyperlink to every image enabling users to click on the image and see it at the full posted size. In the interim, if you right-click on the image and select properties from the context-menu you will see the full URL for that image. You can copy this URL and paste it into the address field of your browser and click on OK (or GO). This will open the image on it's own and at the size posted.

If the site designers cannot implement such an image link feature, then there should be a caution note at the image upload stage advising users that their image should be less than or equal to 500 px wide and less than or equal to 750 px high. Unfortunately, if you're a landscape photographer, this means that your landscape format images will be rather small.

-Thorsten. 

Another update - as TGraphic mentioned above, there are two Gallery views. I will refer to them as the general gallery and the user profile gallery view. It seems like the user profile gallery view is a little more generous in that its width and height elements are 600 pixels and 800 pixels respectively. To further confuse things, this is a 4:3 aspect ratio!

The best thing is to play it safe and size your images to fit within the constraints of the smaller of these two values (500x750) 

Also, if you are viewing an image through the general gallery then there is no need to right-click on an image to view it's properties to get the URL! The URL is already listed below each image in the gallery - just copy that and paste it into your browser address field to view the full size image (there's no need to do this if the image is less than 500x750 pixels).