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Windows is notorious with degrading bitmaps in system. Most people probably tackled the issue with wallpaper. The thing is, that Win resaves your wallpaper as JPEG with very low quality, as a result you get ugly image with many artifacts. This problem is mostly visible when using vector images. The workaround for wallpaper is found here: wallpaper workaround

Now I'm facing the same issue with profile picture. I have created a simple profile pic in Inkscape and exported to PNG, the image was okay. Then I set the picture as a profile pic and the result was really ugly, beacause Win has resaved my artwork as low-quality JPEG.

I was able to find the location of the profile pictures:

%AppData%\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\AccountPictures

but the files are in some weird format. I don't recall the file extension, but it was something like *.mspicture.

The question: Is there any way to trick Windows 8.1 to not use compression or swap the some files for high quality ones?

EDIT : There was some confusion of what am I trying to achieve. So I have mocked a profile picture to show the issue: First is my original vector image exported to PNG (2.54kB): enter image description here

Second is the version produced by Windows compression process - JPEG (2.21kB): enter image description here

Due to poor choice of compression setting the image look really ugly. I perfectly aware why this happens, I'm also perfectly aware that JPEG is the worst choice of format for this type of images.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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For Windows 8.1 please naviagte to C:\Users\All Users\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\ There please look inside the dat-file of your username (if your pc is part of a domain then it will be domainname+username.dat).

This file contains at the bottom the path to the converted profile pictures, e.g. C:\Users\Public\AccountPictures\S-1-5-21-1511121141-1121660372-3665931577-1148{E011FE7F-E70B-4041-B1BB-C112566CBF76}-Image448.jpg

In the targetfolder are jpegs with different resoultions. You will need to modify the permissions of the parent folder to be able to replace the picture with the ones of higher quality.

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  • The .dat file was empty, but on the other path I was able to find the pictures as you stated. Thanks.
    – jnovacho
    Commented Jan 31, 2015 at 14:22
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I think the profile pictures are saved and compressed into another format just for performance purposes and to improve the boot process.

The boot process should be as fast as possible, without losing precious time due to a 8 MB high quality profile picture. I think there's no way to trick Windows to not use compression, unless you have the source code to edit this setting. Just a question: Why on the Earth would you want to use high quality profile picture, if this picture is visible with a medium size in the logon screen and just for few time (the time needed to logon)?

UPDATE

In your case, profile picture != big file in terms of size. By default, it appears that Windows 8 compresses the picture files and this compression cannot be disabled.

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  • I have added some clarification and example of what I want. As you can see, in my case the image size is not the issue. In my case high quality != big file.
    – jnovacho
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 8:59
  • @jnovacho I updated my answer. It's not possible to disable this compression.
    – Alberto Solano
    Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 10:49

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