It’s easy to resize images to avatar size
It’s easy to make an Avatar for your forum, Facebook, Twitter or other account, if you know where to find the tools. It won’t take you long to read this article, and once you’re done, you’ll know where to find free, easy-to-use software to help you create your own avatars (free, fast, and easy).
And no, we’re not talking about ten-foot-tall blue denizens of another planet. For our purposes, an avatar is a small graphical representation of a user. On most forums or social groups, you’ll find that active participants have a small graphic or photographic image 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 interacting user, it can be representative of almost anything. Very often, the avatar represents a person’s physical appearance, one of their interests, or is in tune with the theme of the forum.
Choose your avatar with some thought, especially if you plan to be active on the forum or social group; it will soon become your online image or “Brand” within that group.
The main reason why you can’t just upload any photo or image as an avatar is that they are too big and exceed the settings of the forum or sites. Webmasters who allow avatars to be uploaded to their sites do this to make post pages load more easily. If pages take too long to load, viewers tend not to get their information elsewhere.
You can turn almost any photo editing software into an avatar creator by following a few simple steps:
1- Find the site you want to upload the avatar to and find out the allowed size of the avatar (pixel width and height).
2- Choose a photo or graphic you want to use for your avatar, move or place it in a file or on your desktop or somewhere easy for you to find.
3- Open the photo in a photo editor or image resizer.
4- Follow the instructions to reduce the size of the photo and save it as a new item, but with a different name. *Note: If you save the file with the same name, you risk overwriting the original photo and losing the original format forever. Therefore, if it is important to keep a copy of the intact original, save the element with the “save as” function with a different name.
5- Next, log in to the site where you want to upload the avatar and follow its instructions.
It’s that easy to resize images to use as avatars for your favorite sites and forums.
Some common sites have the following guidelines for avatar sizes:
Facebook Avatar – 200px x 200px
Twitter Avatar – 73px x 73px
LinkedIn Avatar – 80px x 80px
Google Profile – 96px x 96px
Digg – 120px x 120px
