So I installed AOL on my mac the other day… I can’t tell you why just yet, but none the less I installed it.
Now AOL for Mac OS X is still a version or two behind the windows client (though don’t let the numbers fool you; Windows is 9, Mac is 10.3) but let’s not get hung up on that… The moral of the story here is the recompression that AOL is doing to images on the web, or more specifically: that I had forgotten they were doing it.
I thought they quit doing this years ago. Boy was I wrong
You see, in an effort to save bandwidth for their users, AOL does this trick where when you request an image, it goes to their servers first, where it’s re-compressed and cached, and then sent downstream to you.
My god, when I first saw this (compare with this or, this) my heart just plummeted.
I must have spent a solid 20 minutes trying to tweak the selective jpg settings to maximize the quality in the areas of the woman’s face that you concentrate on, while still keeping the image size reasonable. Seriously.
Don’t get me wrong… I understand why they do it. And in the world of sub 56k dial-up (where a huge chunk of their customers probably still are), it totally makes sense.
But as a designer… ugh. it’s killing me… Everything looks so blurry and heavily jpeged. And I have absolutely no control over it.