Creating an Appropriate Avatar - RomanceClass Romance Tips Forum
Avatars are designed to let you "give personality" to your forum posts. This means it should be an image of you (if you are over 18), of your parakeets, or of something related to you. It is not meant to be a promotion. Our online avatar rules state "Please keep any custom avatars at or below 100 x 100 pixels. Thanks! "
While we realize that many members with multiple keets need a slightly larger image size to be able to show all of their keets clearly, we have a hard upper limit of size at 320 wide by 240 high. This is HALF of the screen width and height on a standard browser window!! Any larger than that would be unfairly making those people have an impossible time reading the text they came to our forum to read.
STEP 1 - GET PHOTO ONTO COMPUTER
If you have a digital camera, use the memory stick or cable to get the JPG file onto your computer hard drive. If you have an actual physical photo, scan it in with a scanner and save it to your hard drive.
STEP 2 - GET YOUR PHOTO THE RIGHT SIZE
The easy way to alter an image is to use Paint which comes with pretty much every PC.
Click on Start - Programs - Accessories - Paint
Click on File - Open and browse to find your image
Click on Image - Stretch. Set both the height and width to 50% (i.e. half). Voila! Your image is half as big! You can experiment with different percentages to see what numbers work best for you.
SAVE and you are all set!
PhotoShop is a GREAT program that I use and highly recommend. To resize in PhotoShop:
Open Photoshop from the icon
Click on File - Open and browse to find your image.
Click on Image - Image Size. Set the width to something appropriate (320 or smaller). The height will auto-adjust.
SAVE and you are all set!
STEP 3 - PUT YOUR PHOTO ON THE WEB
Your photo has to be on the web in order for web users to see it. They can't see your hard drive - thank goodness! Most ISPs provide you with free web storage space, or you can sign up for an account at PhotoBucket. If you're using PhotoBucket, log in and click on New Image. Browse to find this JPG you just made. It will copy your image from your hard drive to the PhotoBucket site. When you are looking at your image, click on the URL that ends in .JPG. You now know the URL that points to your image.
STEP 4 - TELL THE FORUMS TO USE THAT IMAGE
In the forums, click on MY PROFILE which is in the upper right. In your profile page, click on EDIT PROFILE which is in the upper left. About halfway down look for the Image Avatar: area and click on "Select a different Avatar Image". Where it says "Use Custom URL:", enter the URL you got in step 3, and save it.
You're all set!
ADVANCED FEATURE - HAVING MULTIPLE IMAGES THAT CYCLE
Start by downloading
UnFREEZ2. Install it and then start it running.
For each photo that you want to include in the cycle, click on the photo in Explorer and drag it into the box. The order that you add the photos in is the order in which they cycle. There is a "Frame Delay" setting that sets how long it shows each photo before moving on to the next one. Set this at about 225 so that each photo stays up for a while before moving on to the next photo.
Thanks to Pretty Bird for helping with this information!
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