1992 LMC - What Would Make A Coin Do This?

Are you talking about the little bumps or the stains?

And if you are "cropping" a photo and the image size stays the same, you are not actually "cropping" - you are "zooming" and losing resolution in the mean time. To "crop" an image means to cut off parts of the image and make it smaller. They are different functions that probably have different tools in your image editing software.

I think it's more of a problem by the supplier of the blanks to the mint.

If they're not electroplated quick enough, the zinc starts to oxidize keeping the copper plating to adhere correctly. And since they do such a large quantity at one time, not all of them get plated properly.

Not sure if the mint QC's the blanks beforehand or not. They may pull a sample of each batch, but they can't inspect them all.

regarding the cropping/resizing issue. I have been using the crop function on HP Photosmart Premier to minimize the image size in order to upload. As an example my starting image will be aprox. 2040x1050 pixels and by using the crop function it zooms in and makes the pic around 400x250 or so, then I can upload. I will try to play around with other functions, but that seems to be the only way on this program. I do have some other programs to experiment with, as well.