Picures Blurry on second viewing?

I upload a pic, pay "good money" to have it accessable in game as a texture. I spend a lot of time in photoshop to make sure that my texture is clean and sharp, at a useable resolution... like 512x512 or whatever...

Pic uploads fine, no problems there. I open it, it looks sharp and clean. I stick it on an object.. again it looks fine. Stick it in my profile.. no problems.

Now.. I close the profile, or delete that object.. and either reopen the profile, or stick that texture on another prim.. and blammo, it seems to be smudgey, and about half the resolution as the original..

What's HAPPENING here? And how can I stop it?

It sounds like the texture isn't rezzing properly the second time. The initial upload does apply jpeg compression, but if it looks ok when you apply it the first time, that's not the problem, and no other processing is done to the image subsequently that would degrade it afaik.

Does it stay like this ? What if you log off, clear your cache and log back in again ? It sounds like it may be cache / asset retrieval issue which can sometimes appear very random with textures failing to rez properly for hours. Various tricks you can try are relogging, clearing your cache, tp'ing out of the area and back again, even zooming in or mousing over the texture to prompt a reload.

Relogging SOMETIMES will clear it back up.. but the problem is.. 'second' view after that will munge it up again.

It's only MY images too.. that's what's annoying. I've tried using 24bit TGA's and Jpegs now.. I'm just not seeing any kind of real change. Textures people send me... no issue.

And it's really not the same as.. like the way skins half-load and make you look like a zombie.. it's as if a 512x512 texture is loading at 400x400 and being perfectly smoothed to size.

images are always very sharp for me the first time i upload them, and it isn't a loading issue after that. for example, some textures create a moire pattern the first time from being too sharp, then they're fine later. although not what i'd call smudgey, just not as sharp.

i suspect that the first upload may not have the jpeg compression showing and it may be showing a local cached copy, rather than the image from the asset server?

It's peculiar that it's only your images - how do they look to OTHER people when they appear munged to you ?

In the meantime, are your graphics card drivers up to date ? Have you tried reinstalling the Second Life client ? Sorry, generic questions I know, but I can't imagine what else it could be atm.

it sounds like a very likely explanation - though i hadn't noticed it myself !

I believe the jpeg compression used by the client on uploads is pretty agressive, so if one had seen it uncompressed first, it would look pretty degraded afterwards. It would explain why other peoples textures don't appear to change as you would only ever see them post compression.