An avatar is an Internet user's representation of themselves in the form of an image or three-dimensional model used in computer games. Most often you'll see them in forums above a user's name. Often this image represents an interest the user has (or a picture of the user).
For the last 6 years we have been using avatars in the Groundspeak Forums and if you've been surfing the many sites on the Internet you may be noticing that they are becoming more prevalent in other areas of web sites. Waymarking and Geocaching will be no different. But how do you create your own avatar?
If you're adept at Adobe Photoshop or Paint you can create one yourself. All you need to know is the general dimensions of the image accepted on the web site. For the old forums, for example, the width is always 75 pixels while the height is variable. The new forums prefer a 75x75 pixel size to keep all of the avatars uniform.
For this HowTo, we'll be using a new site called
mypictr, so the HowTo will be pretty straightforward.
- Visit mypictr.com
- Click the browse button and select a photo from your hard drive. It will upload to the web site and display in the window.
- Ignore the network dropdown and put 75 in both of the size boxes. You'll notice the little box change size.
- Using the zoom controls you can zoom the image in and out to fill the box with whatever avatar image you want.
- When you are ready, click pictrit! You will be able to download the image to your machine.
Once you have your image, you can add your avatar to these forums by doing the following:
- Log into the forums and click on your name in the upper-right hand corner of the screen.
- Click on the Avatar tab
- Click on the browse link and find the image saved to your machine, then click update.
- Make sure Enable Avatar is set to "yes"
You're all set!