Friends Online - PNG Images Not Showing

Hello Everyone...

I've been doing a little profile photography for friends. I followed the instructions in the SL knowledgebase http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/How_to_set_profile_pictures which says: "You must save your image as a PNG file."

In the past, I've done some photos using the TGA, but lately I've been using PNG since SL seems to be pretty clear on the matter: "You must save..."

Okay. I save the image file as in the PNG format, upload it, and my friend puts the image in their profile. So far so good.

This is where it's get interesting. I go to my Dashboard and select "Manage" under the Friends panel so I can view "Friends Online."

When I "View Photos," any profile photo that I have done using PNG format, is blank. No photo. Just a blank white space. Nada.

But any photo that I've done using TGA appears just fine.

According to the knowledgebase, you are suppose to use PNG, but when it comes to viewing a profile photo in "Friends Online" you really should be using TGA.

Does anyone know why this is?

That's a really terrible KB article. I have no idea why it says you "must" use PNG. You can use any of the four formats that SL supports. Somebody goofed on that one. I'm correcting it now.

As for the dashboard issue, I'm wondering if it has to do with the age of the image. Maybe it takes a little time for the website to generate its version. You mentioned your TGA-source images are older than your PNG-sourced ones, right? What happens if you upload a brand new TGA? Does it show up on the site?

There's no way I can think of that the source format should be able to make any difference, since what gets uploaded to SL is a JPEG2000 copy, generated by your local viewer at the time of upload, not the actual source image itself. If I really had to stretch, I'd ask you if you perhaps inadvertently added a blank alpha channel to the images, which would cause them to become transparent once uploaded. But you'd know it if you did, since it would have been pretty hard not to notice that checkerboard staring you in the face.

Anyway, when look at my Friends Online listing, I do notice the pic of one of friends is not displaying. I'm seeing just a blank field. It's not white, though. It's light blue. If you're on a low contrast monitor, I guess it could potentially look white. In any case, I just checked the profile in-world, and there is a pic there. For whatever reason, the website just isn't reproducing it. Again, my best guess is that the image is too new for the website to have scooped it up yet.

Thanks Chosen for the information and suggestions. What's interesting is that I and others can see the PNG profile pictures fine in-world. But you can't see them in the dashboard.

I'm following your suggestion to create some TGA's and will try those. I'll let you know what I find out in a couple of days.

Thanks again.

I just wanted to follow up to my original post. I have found that sometimes it takes a while - sometimes over a week - for the profile pics to appear on the dashboard. But, indeed, PNG's do appear. You just have to wait a while.

Thanks for following up. I figured that's what was going on.