profile photo 20K limit!

I'm really not a whinger or vain.. but the 20K limit on the profile photo is a bit ridculous.. I though i'd put up a pic that my friend sent me from the weekend and it turned into one of those horrible computer things where I wish I hadn't started.. but it became a challenge to get the damn thing to work.. after cropping and shrinking and compressing i finally end with something looks like it's been through the washing machine to get under 20K..

oh well.. whinge over!!

Might be good to increase it!!

:excl: Try hotlinking it from a web based foto album (photobucket.com for example).

I don't think 20k is an unreasonable limit, but I will look into increasing it.

JDee, your profile picture is an image that is 800 by 1200 pixels but only has anything in the upper left corner, with the rest being white. It looks to me like you've somehow gone a bit wrong in resizing it.

Use PaintShop Pro 7+. It's easy once you get to know it. Google finds plenty of sites which tell you how to get started. You can reduce the photo to about 300 x 300 pixels and then compress it by up to about 50x compression rate. I managed to get good quality web photos down to about 8 to 20k. After reduction, sharpen and lighten them. Try not to use contrast or any clarity tools.

If you are unsure have a look at my website photos - click my profile. I use PSP for quickness. I also use Fireworks, Adobe products and some automatic web album programmes, but PaintShopPro has proven to be quick and easy to use. It's good for beginners, but not good for profis in a working environment.

PSP version 7 is the best version to start with. It got a little complicated after that. If you still have an old Microsoft Office 2000 Pro CD, try MS PhotoDraw v2, which was on the CD. It was way ahead of it's time. No new versions were released since the end of 1999.

Don't save as gif, bmp or in a special format used by a photo programme, only as jpg/jpeg. Smilies can be gif's, but they have very few colours.

You are welcome to send me your photo to be reduced. Which programme do you use?

20k is more than enough if you use PSP.

There might be some downloads of free photo reduction programmes on www.com.com

Have fun.

I would recommend The Gimp. It's free (open source) and it's very good. You need to click around the site a bit to find the windows version, and you'll also need to install GTK, but it's worth it.

just right click on the photo and choose "resize pictures", choose handheld and and up load that one.

It's ok just playing with that link a pic thing here's one from last saturday of a VERY worried looking Fuchs (I was grinning later though).

http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b243/Fuchs66/Pete3.jpg