how to post an avatar

[kiwi girl]

I'd love to post an avatar but I don't know how or if I can with my system. I've got a cute wee picture of my bike which I copied off a web page and then pasted into a word document - but I don't know where to take it from here. Any advice

[DeniseGoldberg]

You said you saved your picture in a word document. I think it needs to be saved as a graphic type like .jpg. It needs to be really tiny too. If you're running Windows, you have a copy of Microsoft Paint on your computer. You can paste your image there, and then save it. You can use the Image... Attributes menu item to save it in a smaller size.

Once you have the file you need... in TE forums:

Click on User CP in the bar at the top of your screen. It's the first item on the left side.

Once there, click on Edit Avatar.
From that page you will be able to upload your avatar.

Good luck, and if you run into problems, be sure to post another question here!

[Irulan]

when you saved the file off the net, it should have saved as something like "photo.jpg" or "image.bmp". That is the file you want to upload, just the file, not the document.

If you need to edit the size, Windows photo viewer has a compress for web feature.

if you have web space to upload to, that works also, just upload the file and reference the URL.

[kiwi girl]

Thanks Denise. I've now managed to save it as a jpeg file. The difficulty I have now is getting it the right size. When I use the file attributes and change the size the image goes blank (ie just a white space)

[Irulan]

you need to resize through an image editor. You can either set the new size by pixel width, or by a percentage of current size. If you have Office, you can use the MS picture manager to edit, resize and then compress for web.

[DeniseGoldberg]

Oops, sorry - Irulan's very right, you'll need to use Microsoft Photo Editor. I think that's what I used to resize my photo, not paint. If you open your picture there, use the image... resize... option. If you set the units to pixels, then set the larger dimension to 100 (to meet the 100x100 requirements for the avatar), the other dimension will be resized automatically.

[kiwi girl]

I don't appear to have any image editors on my system - or not that I know about or can find - that's what happens when you let the IT dept 'upgrade' your computer I guess - I'm sure I used to be able to do it. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to be avatarless for a while