Loss of quality / sharpness

... I just resize and sometimes crop the photos in Microsoft Office Picture manager...

That would be your main problem. Get a copy of Photoshop Elements or download Gimp for free. You'll see a huge difference using real photo editing software compared to the garbage software that is M-soft Picture manager.

If you want an excellent picture editor and resizer download Irfanview from www.irfanview.com It's free.

It's been around forever, does excellent quality resizing with a choice of several different algorithms, choice of dpi settings, etc. Also does cropping and similar basic stuff. And it wil convert almost any file format to any other. It even works on some RAW formats.

- Leigh

Brian, being that you're asking why the photos on Photo.net aren't as sharp as the same picture you uploaded from your hard drive(at least I feel pretty certain that's what you're asking), you need to resize the pictures to 680 pixels wide or smaller. When clicking on a picture wider than 680 pixels to view it in the large uploaded size, it should look the same as what you have on your hard drive, but to keep the default view of the picture from being compressed keep it at 680.