—Optimizing AOL for viewing images —

AOL has customized their Browser with the goal of making web pages load quicker. The AOL browser compresses graphics, as a result, the images you view on the AOL browser may not appear as the Designer intended them to be seen or it may fail to load images all together. On informational type web sites (where graphics are often used just to add a little "spice" to a page) you may appreciate this "favor" that AOL has done for you! However, on image intensive web sites & sites where maintaining image quality is important you will likely have problems. You may need to shut off AOL's compressed graphics setting to use our Java Applet.

We are going to show you how to easily optimize AOL so that you can view all web images as they were intended to be seen. If you have been getting "unable to load image" messages, errors loading photos or the photos & background just "looks off" then this will surely cure the problem. You may want to print this page, otherwise just follow along - it will be painless, and yes, if you decide later you want to undo this change you can do so!

 
Are you ready? Refer to the Main Screen Shot below and let's go...
  1. Click the "My AOL" icon and a menu will appear.
  2. Click the "Preferences" menu item, and...
AOL 4.0 Main Screen Shot

AOL Screen Shot

 
  1. ... a special "Preferences Window" now appears (shown below), click on the WWW icon and ...
AOL Preferences Screen Shot

AOL Screen Shot

 
  1. ... an Internet Properties dialog box appears (shown below). It will probably open with the "General" tab in the foreground so click on "Web Graphics" tab to bring that panel into view.
  2. If there is a check mark next to "Use compressed graphics" you need to uncheck (remove) it. You do this by simply clicking it. When finished, you want it to look just the screen shot below.
  3. Click the OK button at the bottom.
  4. The AOL Preferences window (that you previously opened - shown above) will probably still need to be closed, just click the "x" in the top right corner of that window to close it and you are almost done...
AOL Internet Properties Screen Shot

AOL Screen Shot

 
  1. You will now need to close AOL and then re-open it to make this change take effect.