FAQ: Photo Viewing Tips

For optimal viewing of photo sites, we suggest that you press F11 key for full-screen mode. This eliminates the window borders and title bar. 

While in full screen mode, for further space savings, right click on an empty spot on the menu bar, and turn on Auto-Hide. This hides the browser menu and tool bars and  leaves the entire screen for photo viewing. 

You may press F11 again after you finished viewing photos to return to normal window mode. 

Internet Explorer 6.0 has a new feature called Automatic Image Resizing which allows you to view large images no low resolution screens. That resolution translation process naturally creates severe distortions. To disable it:

From Internet Explorer 6: Click Tools menu, select Internet Options, click Advanced tab, scroll to Multimedia section, Uncheck the box:
   Enable Automatic Image Resizing 

Issue #1: Photo Quality.  AOL users will experience difficulties in viewing photos in web sites. The symptom: Most pictures are very fuzzy. By default, AOL does not provide you with the actual file as stored on the web site. In an effort to cope with major web traffic bottleneck, AOL intercepts any graphics file larger than icon size, converts it into "progressive" format and sends a partial file while withholding the rest. This is known as prematurely terminating progressive rendering. The result is a very distorted and unclear photo. You can fix that by turning off the default Compressed Web Graphics setting: 1. Click on My AOL menu. 2. Click on Preferences. 3. Click on WWW button. 4. Click on Web Graphics tab. 5. Click to UN-check Use compressed graphics box. NOTE: The above instructions are for United States version 5.0 AOL for PC. The exact menu wording and sequence would vary in mac versions, international editions and other revisions.   See also: instructions with Screen Shots.

Issue #2: Web Traffic & Outage In addition to the picture clarity problem, you would also certainly experience frequent partial outage of web access. This is above and beyond the normal general Internet congestion and delay. If you are unable to access any web page, simply wait and retry later. Majority of the time it's AOL's web gateway bandwidth problem. Sometimes it's almost guaranteed to not work daily during busy hours. Try to access it during off-peak hours, or consider switching to a standard ISP for better compatibility and performance. You may optionally keep AOL with the BYOA plan for your existing email and access their proprietary contents.

Issue #3: Bring-Your-Own-Access (BYOA) Plan Users. If you are an internet user accessing AOL thru your own ISP via TCP/IP, do not access the web thru AOL. Doing so would significantly and needlessly degrade performance due to extra hops added to the path and the AOL web bottleneck mentioned above. Instead, click on the AOL hot links only to obtain the URL, and copy it to your browser. Once you've launched a site, you're free to navigate normally and directly via your ISP.