I’m stuck and need a hand. We’ve got a new social networking site where members upload their own profile photos which is used in their profiles as well as in thumbnail versions in forum posts etc. The issue is we’re losing picture quality badly when resizing the pictures at upload stage and struggling to figure out a way to resize the pics to fit into a standard box size in their profile and as thumbnails without it looking stretched or bad quality.
Our developers cant find a solution and we’re desperate, any suggestions (that wont compromise site speed)?? How does other social networking/dating sites do it? Online cropping facility at upload stage? 
Thanks in advance! 
Ps. Their using PHP, AJAX, HTML and CSS as the Frontend and MySQL as Backend. Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw and Macromedia Dreamweaver for designing and Macromedia Flash for the Animations.
you need to track down where and how the images are being handled. At some stage in the process they are being resampled/compressed/resized. Whatever settings are being applied (even if they are the default settings) are obviously too aggressive.
Image handling and galleries are very common but also that means there are tons of different systems and programs, without more specifics it is hard to be much more help than that.