The Zim Family Cocker Spaniel Forum

You'll notice that a lot of us on the forum have a picture of ourself that is displayed underneath our name. It shows up with every post we make. This is called an Avatar.

You can see mine over there on the left side of the screen.


If you'd like to set up an avatar for yourself, the first step is to resize a picture to no larger than 155 pixels wide and tall. If you don't already have image editing software for resizing a photo, you can use my free online photo resizing tool at http://www.zimfamilycockers.com/ResizeImage.html

Once you've got a photo that has been resized to the correct dimensions... you are ready to upload it to the forum as your avatar. To do this, go to http://zimfamilycockers.com/Forums/ucp.php?i=profile&mode=avatar Click the gray box that says "choose file". Locate the photo on your hard drive, and double click it. Finally, click on the "submit" button to submit the photo to the forum as your avatar.

To verify that it worked properly, you can either find one of your old posts on the forum... it should show up there, to the left, under your name... or you can simply go to http://zimfamilycockers.com/Forums/ucp.php?i=profile&mode=avatar and it should now show up there, if you set it up correctly.

And while you're in the mood to customize your forum account...

How about adding a signature line? That's the little line of text that is displayed underneath all of your posts. List your dog's names, say something funny... whatever!

You can set up a forum signature at http://zimfamilycockers.com/Forums/ucp.php?i=profile&mode=signature

Question for those of you 'in the know' ........ how do I use 2 pictures in my Avatar? Meaning ..... the pictures change back and forth (slowly)

Thanks for any and all help in advance

and Jim Zim for all your hard work getting the Forum up and running again

To get multiple pictures in to an avatar, you need to create what is known as an "animated GIF file".

There are web sites on the Internet that can do this for you for free. Do a Google search for "create animated GIF". Speaking from much experience in creating animated GIF avatars... my suggestion is to start by cropping and resizing the individual pictures so that each is the same exact size and so that each is within the size limits for avatars. To put that simply... your best bet is to crop and resize each individual picture so that it is 150x150 pixels. Once you've done that... go to one of those web sites that will take the individual pictures and put them together in to an animated GIF file for you.

If you try to use pictures that are all different sizes... your animated GIF file will look a bit awkward. They look the best if each picture is exactly the same size as the next.

The big thing to watch out for regarding animated GIF avatars is the file size limit for avatars. The limit is 300k. If you put too many pictures in to an animated GIF, you might possibly exceed that.