Members sometimes ask us why their photos lack clarity.

Photo problems are almost always down to the resolution of the original being too low. As a rough guide, photos must be at least 60k because the enlarged photos in your photo albums are around 60k. If the original is less than 60k, then site has to expand your photo. This basically involves filling in gaps, so the photo will appear grainy and not clear.

Here is a photo of me created by the site, from a tiny thumbnail original of just 9k. Yes, believe it or not, people do upload 9k images.

80x80 thumbnail. Looks OK because its 9k file size is the same as the original.

120x120 as used in the Profile views. Starting to lack clarity because the image is 15k from an original of 9k.

This is the full size image of 300×300 which would appear in the photo Albums. As you can see, it looks pretty bad. The site has had to expand the original 9k image to make it fit. This just creates a grainy and poor quality image.

Full size. Looks bad

Here is the same photo but this time from an original that was 1Mb.

Photo Album image of 60k, 300x300 pixels from 1Mb original

So, our top tips

1. Make sure you upload photos that are at least 60 to 100k. Otherwise your photos are going to look grainy.

2. You main image must be a head shot. Also upload a selection of others. You can have up to 8 images in your album.

3. The max file size is 2Mb. If your photo is over that, please crop it or resize the image using photo editor software. You can also use Outlook to email your photo to yourself. Outlook had an inbuilt photo compressor.

Happy Dating

Paul Ergatoudis

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2011 at 2:37 pm and is filed under FAQs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.