Hi everyone,

One of the new features that we added to the forum when completing the latest update was to allow larger Avatars that you can choose to upload on your own. I know that some of you already know your way around different graphics manipulation software and know how to resize images, but I'm sure that there's some members who don't, so I though I'd make up a quick tutorial.

This tutorial will show you how to take a large image (of a property, your house, picture of your family) and change the pixel and file size of it to best display it in the forum.

The reason you have to do this is because we limit the size of your Avatar picture to 200 x 200 pixels, or 35KB, whichever comes first. This is done for a variety of reasons, the biggest being loading time - someone connecting on a slow connection doesn't want to have to download a 1 MB avatar that gets shrunk to 200 pixels in the end anyways.

Adjusting the size of the picture is VERY easy to do in Photoshop, and doesn't take more than 2 or 3 minutes to complete from start to finish.

If you use a different software package, please let me know, and I'll see what I can do about making a tutorial for that package as well.

Prerequisets:
1) Image manipulation software is already installed
2) Desired image is already on local computer

Once you're all set up, let's shrink this image.

Step 1) Open image in Photoshop using the File -> Open



Step 2) Select the "Crop" tool (from the left hand tool bar)


Step 3) Highlight the area you wish to focus on for the Avatar by dragging the crop tool over the image. You can resize the selected area by using the tabs in the corners and on the edges of the crop box.


Step 4) Right-click anywhere on the selected portion of the image, and select "Crop"


You should be left with just the portion that you cut out. For our example, it looked like this:


Step 5) Now we want to decrease the pixel width and height of the image. The RealEstateWebmasters forum has a maximum pixel size of 200 x 200 pixels, and a maximum file size of 35K for Avatar pictures. What we need to do is make your image abide by these restrictions.

We do this by clicking on the "Image" menu option, and click on "Image Size"


Step 6) In the following screen, you may set the width and height of the image manually. Since the maximum size is 200 x 200 pixels, and our width is greater than our height (it's a landscape picture), I set the width to 200, and leave the height field alone. The height gets set automatically as the image tries to scale itself.


Step 7) Now you're done making the adjustments to the image, and we want to save it. Select File -> Save For Web... from the menu, in order to save it with the best file compression for display on the internet.


Step 8) In the "Save For Web" window, you can see the anticipated file size in the bottom left corner.

If your file size is still above 35K you need to make some adjustments by adjusting the "Preset" dropdown menu in the top right. Your main options are going to be between a "GIF" and a "JPEG" image type. The default file type is GIF, but JPEGs use a more aggressive compression algorithm, and you might find that you get a marginaly smaller file. My final image looked like this:



Select the "Save" option, give it a filename, and put the image somewhere where you'll be able to find it again - you're almost done.

Step 9) Log in to the forum, and select the "User CP" option. Select the "Edit Avatar" option, and click on "Browse" to upload your Avatar from your local computer. The Avatar is stored into our database to make load times faster, and you're done!!!

Good Luck everyone, and if you have any problems, please let me know.