How do you enlarge a picture without losing it's quality?

I have a great program that is a plug in to Photoshop, which allows 'lossless' enlargement. I have taken a 4 MP picture and blew it up to print out on 96 pieces of paper with my laser printer to make a 6' x 8' print. The clarity was fantastic. If you send me your email address, I can send you a picture of the 6' x 8'. I have also enlarged a wallet size picture from Playboy and made it lifesize (with elimination of some print artifacts via Photoshop) about 8" x 10"

Basically you can't. Any given image, from film or digital, is at it's absolute highest resolution in it's original format. You begin to lose resolution in moment you increase its size.

You can digitally enhance an enlarged image to clean it up a bit, buy you still won't have the quality of the original image.

it is very difficult to do. Given that an image is made up of pixels (little colored squares, essentially) when you enlarge a picture you are, in essence, making the little squares into bigger sqares, which diminishes image quality. The smaller the resolution of the original picture (176x144 is very small) the more noticeable the pixelation is. This is why it is so important, when buying a digital camera, to get the resolution you need. I routinely get 1600x1200 resolution on my camera (and can get higher if needed) which gives me a lot of flexibility to upsize and downsize pictures.

the short answer is, I don't think there is a good reliable way to get a picture of the size you are talking about enlarged without serious degradation.

Whenever one enlarges a photo one loses detail and runs the risk of artefacts!

I would suggest that you try to enlarge in Photoshop in increments of 10% and using the Bicubic smoother option.

If this is an images grabbed from the internet I suggest you look for a stock library that supplies free public domain images at the resolution you need.

It may be possible in photoshop or gimp if you open your image and a new page of the size you want. copy the image, and paste it as new layer, onto the new page, then rescale the layer to the size of your page I have achieved reasonable results this way depending on the quality of the original

The answers is, "you can't," plain and simple. No more possible than you can stretch a road to accommodate more cars without taking up more space.