Site Images Spontaneously "rotting"

[Boojum]

A new mystery: Why would the images I use on my site spontaneously deteriorate?

 

I uploaded the great majority of my images over a year ago, and have not altered them in any way, and yet I suddenly find over the past month or so that most of them no longer look like the images I constructed and uploaded. In particular, the mouseover states of my navigation tabs and buttons look strange: Ordinarily in shades of gray "glass" with turquoise text, they now have streaks of red that I cannot account for, and the text is virtually illegible. Also notable is the newly apparent roughness of the "metal" bars I use for my site slogan and copyright warning. And in general, virtually all the images look jagged and of inferior quality -- which they were not previously.

 

Has anyone else had a similar experience, and if so, what causes it and is there any remedy?

 

(Note: If needed for purposes of comparison, I can upload samples of the original images from my computer.)

[TweezerMan]

The images look fine to me in both Firefox and IE - they appear to be as you say they are supposed to be. I'd first suggest deleting the files in your browser's cache, then reload the page and see if the images are still 'deteriorated'.

[Boojum]

I have cleared my browser (IE 5.16 for Mac OS 9) cache roughly 30 times in the two months during which this problem has manifested. This does not appear to be the issue.

[GroovyFish]

The images look fine here as well. No red streaks on mouseover on either the top nav or the side buttons.

 

If you would like me to post a screen shot of what I see, I can!

[Deverill]

Hi Booj,

It looks fine here on Linux Firefox as well. Perhaps there is a problem with your browser? Maybe an upgrade that went wrong is responsible. Have you tried other browsers?

[bellringr]

Is it just your graphics that look weird? Is everything else ok?

[TCH-Don]

Looks good to me

in IE and Firefox

[marie b.]

Looks fine to me, too.

[Boojum]

My thanks to all of you for examining my site and letting me know what you saw.

 

Apparently, this will remain an unsolved mystery for the moment. The images, as seen on my computer, are still "off," as they have been for a bit over two months. Clearing my browser cache has no effect, and the problem does not appear to affect any other sites.

 

It will soon cease to be relevant anyway; I'm about to redesign some of the images in question.

[Madmanmcp]

If they look fine to everyone but you, the problem is on your side. I would suggest its your monitor, your video card or your video drivers. Check the easy things first. Play around with the controls on your monitor, color, contrast, brightness and see if that corrects it. Then check your video drivers and see if you have the latest version. Last resort would be the video card.

[Madmanmcp]

Another thing to check is your monitor settings, did you lower the resolution to 640 x 480 or the color from 16 million to 256?

[abinidi]

Another thing I would suggest looking at (if you are on dial-up) is if your ISP is using an accelerator.

 

I'll admit, I'm still on dialup , (this is why I know about this...) and in order to speed up the time it takes for pages to load, my ISP installed a program on my computer that reduces image quality in order to download the page faster.

 

I know that Earthlink is one provider that has this ability; I believe AOL has something similar.

 

If I am using Earthlink and IE 6, then I can right-click on an image and tell it to reload that image with full-quality. However, that right-click option isn't available in Firefox.

 

When you talked about image distortion, this is the first thing that came to mind. Maybe it is the answer. Maybe not. Just thought I'd offer it as a possibility.

[Boojum]

Thank you, MadmanMCP/Bob and abinidi, for presenting the above suggested solutions.

 

I think, however, that there is a fatal flaw in all of them: As I specified in my previous post, the image distortion appears only on my site. I can't imagine this would occur in any of the scenarios suggested.

 

What I wonder is whether my ISP could, without notifying me, have cached the images on its own server in low-quality format to save a bit of bandwidth (at my expense, but then, business has -- for the most part -- no ethical objections to shortchanging its customers if doing so will increase profits).