More Awesome Than You!

I dunno if this might be mac-specific as a lot of other mac-users seem to have this problem but try as I might I cannot get a decent portrait or (using the career reward camera} photo. The portraits always come out wildly off-centre even though I have spent ages centering them up and trying to get a good angle.
Same with the camera. The picture either comes out out-of-focus or badly centred.
This is really irritating. I constantly see nice portraits and photos in other people's legacies but cannot do it myself.
I've taken to using photobooth pictures as these are all that works.
Is this a common problem? Are any fixes known?

Are you running TS2 at the same resolution as your desktop?  I can't remember if this matters in windowed mode, but for some reason matching desktop and game resolution fixes the problem when you run the game full screen.

Aspyr never fixed this, if you send an email to them you get a very helpful reply that your game needs to be reinstalled.

Ah, The resolution could well be the problem. The desktop runs at 1680x1050 and TS2 at 1280x800. Problem is I don't like the game in 1680x1050 , the images are smaller (if sharper) and it dosen't fill this big screen (a 20' Cimema Display)
Oh well if that is the problem I can live with it and kudos to you!

Assuming you have a "The Sims 2" directory and associated subdirectories in the Mac version similar to what Win users have in My Documents (I find the Mac OS filing system rather opaque):

Immediately after you capture the image for the photo or painting, the image is stored in the main Storytelling folder as screenshot.bmp and snapshot.bmp. These files are overwritten the next time you make a screen capture from within the game.

You can replace the image in snapshot.bmp (not screenshot.bmp) with one of your own (even an in-game snapshot), but (at least in Windows) you need to adjust the proportions of the image so that it looks correct on the painting or photo (the game uses a "squeezed" image that is expanded when displayed in the game). Basically, just match the dimension of your replacement image to those of the original image, without constraining proportions. You want the image to become shorter top-to-bottom but not more narrow.

You can also use a "squeezed" image created by the game for a sim painting or photo to make a standard recolor of the Lady on Red painting using the Photo Studio feature of SimPE. First you "normalize" the image by doubling the vertical dimension (from 450 pixels to 900 pixels in Windows) and then reduce it to 256 x 343. In this case you would save the resized image as a .png file.

Finally, if you're sim has completed a custom portrait or landscape and it's no longer available as the snapshot.bmp file, you can retrieve the image from your sim's lot package file. These images as well as photobooth pics (at least those you've hung on the wall) are stored in the Texture Image section of the lot file, and can be exported as .png files using SimPE.

Of course, you can't do either of these last two things using a Mac, since you can't run SimPE.   ::)

This is good advice. Unfortunately, Mac users cannot use SimPE unless they go to the trouble of installing a Windows partition on their hard drive. I, myself, have chosen to do this, but many Mac users do not want Windows on their HD.

Oops - I just noticed that Hegelian already said this at the end of his post. Oh well.

Actually, you posted your reply while I was editing mine.   ;D

This happened to me a while back for no reason.  I ended up reinstalling my game (for other reasons) and haven't had a problem since.  If while your Sim is taking a picture, you look to the very edge of your lot, you will see the actual photo object there.