Avatars (The Picture By Your Name)

[Thumper]

Avatars
An avatar is the little photo, normally a photo of the actual person making the post (but doesnt have to be), that appears next to your name on the left hand side of a message. You can set this up in two ways:

1) the same way as adding a regular photo (see thread here) and paste it into your profile BUT please only do this if you know how to resize a photo to make it to ideally no more than 115 pixels. If you add a photo that is too large your avatar will take up the whole screen and you'll look a little silly If you dont know how to do that then;

2) attach any photo to an email and send it to me manderson@glenabbeyslo-pitch.com I will crop the photo for you, reduce it to the appropriate size, host it on the GASPL server and set up the appropriate link in your profile. PLEASE remember to tell me your username in the email, or I wont know which profile to add it to. I dont mind changing avatars every so often but please dont send me a new one every day and then decide to go back to an old one.

What makes a good avatar
The area that you want to show should fill the photo as much as possible, no point using a shot of you in the distance, because once it is reduced down you will be a speck that can hardly be seen. Also, as I often need to crop avatars, if I have to crop a small area and make it fit the 115 pixel guidelines then the quality is going to be much reduced too. Make sure the subject fills the photo as much as possible.

For techies, I generally reduce the photos to a quality of 70%, for ladies I am kinder

Surprisingly, cell phone and webcam photos work quite well, since I have to reduce and then sharpen them the photo is often better quality than the original once optimised.