Need more avatars/profile photos

[toneysibus]

Hello folks. One quick piece of feedback on an otherwise excellent site: apparently, I'm only allowed to upload profile pics under 6 kb. This makes it very difficult to upload a pic of myself that isn't heavily pixelated. Is there a workaround? Or maybe you have avatars that I can use for this?

Thanks much,
Toney

[Barrie]

This can be difficult depending on your photo editor, but in most you go to Edit|Resize to bring the size down. Takes a bit of fiddling.
Good luck.

[byron]

If you are using photo editing software like Photoshop, resize your image and then "saving for web/device" will save it as a gif file and will be small enough to use as an avatar.

Here's a fast method with a little less creative control. Upload your image to http://www.shrinkpictures.com/create-avatar/resize.php or another resizing web service and you can upload your image and download it from the site in a proper size.

An even faster way is to just download an avatar from the internet that matches your personality. Do a google search for "free forum avatar download" and you will come across tons of site with free pre-made avatars.

[MikeW]

If you can, save the image as a jpeg or .jpg file, and that operation will compress it by a factor of 10. It is possible that SwM's forum software will compress it for you when you upload it, and if that's true, it means you can actually submit a much larger image, say 40KB, as a GIF or PNG, and it will still be accepted.

JPEG is a lossy compression process & file format. When you save to .jpg format, you lose information, so keep the original around...

-Mike

[bigbells]

Quick (sort of) method for making a file size small enough to use as an avatar, for Windows users:
1)Put the picture on a page (of any kind) and have the page visible on your monitor screen.
2)Press the "PrtScrn" key on your keyboard.
3)Open MS Paint (it's in "accessories" of all Windows computers.)
4)"Paste". The screenshot will now be pasted in its entirety.
5)"Select" just the picture and "cut".
6)Open a "new" Paint page. (When you are asked if you want to save the existing one, just say "discard").
7)"Paste" what you have cut in the new page.
8)Adjust the size to 90 X 90 pixels or less, if necessary, using "Stretch and Skew". The picture will most likely now be smaller in file size than the 6000b maximum.
9)"Save As" (select a place on your computer to store the picture, and select "jpeg" as the file type).
10)Go to your profile in the Sweet Maria's forum User Control Panel and upload the picture.