[dave riley]

Newbie here, hope someone can help me. Sometimes I will receive an e-mail from my family that has pictures included. When i try to make the pictures my desktop image i am given choices of: center and stretch. If i choose stretch in order to fill my screen, the result will be an unrecognizable image. These pictures are jpeg images. Can someone explain to me in simple terms how i can expand it so it's legible? Thanks in advance. I have a gateway laptop with xp sp2 120 g hard drive and 2g of ram.

[xgerryx]

Welcome to TSG

The reason you are getting an unrecognizable is more than likely due to the image being compressed by their email program to make it more email friendly.
Contact your family member and ask them to send you the image at full size.

[dave riley]

Thanks for your help xgerryx. I will do as you say and I'm sure that's the solution.

[ChuckE]

What do you see when you select "Center"?

If the image is the same, but very small, then that shows you that the image you are wanting to use is small, perhaps too small for your purpose. That is something that you have to decide.

If that is the issue, then either get a larger image to use, or suffer your choice.

[Knotbored]

Make the image the same proportions as your screen (1025 X 768 is 1 to .75) this probably will require you to crop the image since 3X5 or 5X7 isn't those same proportions, and the distortion you see is the computer stretching the image to fit.