It's Easy to Resize Pictures to Avatar Size
It's easy to make an Avatar for your forum, face book, twitter or other account, if you know where to find the tools. This article won't take long to read and once you're done you will know where to find free and easy to use software that will help you make your own avatars (free, fast, and easy).
And no we are not talking about blue ten foot tall inhabitants of another planet. For our purposes an avatar is a small graphical representation of a user. In most forums or social groups you will find that active participants have a small graphic or photo images or icons next to, above, or below their names.
The purpose of an avatar is to help identify the user, and while the avatar is generally a very distinct representation of the interfacing user it can be representative of almost anything. Quite often the avatar depicts a persons physical appearance, one of their interests or is in tone with the forum theme.
Choose your avatar with some thought, especially if you plan to be at all active in the forum or social group; it will soon become your online image or "Brand" within that group.
The primary reason you cannot simply upload any photo or picture as an avatar is that they are too large and exceed the forum or sites settings. Webmasters that allow avatar uploads to there sites do this so that the pages of posts will load more easily. If the pages take too long to load, viewers tend t get their information elsewhere'
You can turn almost any photo editing software into and avatar maker by following a few easy steps:
1- Search the site you wish to upload the avatar to and discover the allowable size of the avatar (pixel width and height ).
2- Choose a photo or graphic that you wish to use for your avatar, move it or locate it to a file or on your desktop or somewhere it will be easy for you to find.
3- Open the photo in a photo editor or picture re-sizer.
4- Follow the directions for reducing the photo size and save as a new item, but with a different name. * Note -if you save the file using the same name you run the risk of overwriting the original photo and losing the original format forever. Therefore if it is important to save a copy of the original intact save the item with the "save as" function using a different name.
5- Next login in to the site you wish to upload the avatar to and follow their instructions.
It's just that easy to resize pictures to be used as avatars for your favorite sites and forums.
Some Common sites have the following guidelines for avatar sizes:
Facebook Avatar - 200 pixels x 200 pixels
Twitter Avatar - 73 pixels x 73 pixels
LinkedIn Avatar - 80 pixels x 80 pixels
Google Profile - 96 pixels x 96 pixels
Digg - 120 pixels x 120 pixels
As if that's not simple enough there are several free online and downloadable software programs available. To get a list of popular free photo and avatar creator software: squidoo.com/Shrink_A_Picture
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