talkmagic.co.uk

This one post takes me from being a junior to a full member, and whilst I don't expect a badge or certificate or a fanfare and drum roll to this exclusive sect / cult, I've got a pic of some Bicycle cards that I think would make a highly original and inventive avatar to mark this momentous occasion for me as a now fairly regular user of Talk Magic (to the detriment of posting on Magic Bunny and The Magic Cafe: Talk Magic is where it's at ladies and gents). Anyway, I digress. More importantly, much to my dismay, I was about to upload said picture as an avatar when i discovered, to the chagrin of one's Talk Magic profile, that uploaded pictures are limited to a mere 8kb. Now, I understand the rationale for this, but the pic i'd envisaged is a whopping 843kb or summat. 8kb would be the equivalent of the cyclist's helmet on the iconic Bicycle back. So: what can I do to make this smaller? To 8kb? Can i compress it any way? I don't think you could apply magic to this, unless you are a technical wizard. I only have MS Paint as a tool, so any technical suggestions will be beyond me. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Sounds like it's either way too huge or it's a .bmp

.jpeg or .gif is what ya need. And scale it down.


Also, if you host it online elsewhere, you can just link directly to it. If you have some webspace somewhere, otherwise an online image storing site.

As i explained to another member recently (i don't want to sound like I work for them! ) photobucket.com allows you to upload, edit and host images which you can then link directly to.
My avatar is hosted on there and it was also edited and sized down on there too, so it's pretty good.

There are other sites which do the same thing though.

thanks magicbell

it is a jpeg file, although i did cut and paste it from an Adobe Acrobat pdf.

I've tried cutting sections out of the jpeg (the whole pic is in fact a scatter of Bicycle cards), but a decent image of what i actually what is still 100kb

You mentioned scaling it down: is there a way of doing this?

In any case, if it's too complex i may just leave it, as it's not too important, more of a flourish really.

Yeah, you just reduce the quality of the image. Being that it needs to be so small anyway, to fit in the avatar space, this reduction is hardly visible - as shown by all of our avatars.

Photobucket has resizing option for avatar size

drop the dpi of the image, and save for web...

Increase the jpeg compression, too. If it's avatar sized, but taking up that much memory, then you might be saving it without any compression at al.

You can email the picture to me if you like and I'll reformat it for use as an avatar no probs. katykins.com at gmail.com if you're still struggling with the pic

If you've only got MS Paint then you can resize it, but the quality of the resulting file will be absolutely terrible.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone: i've tried resizing and it's less than 8kb, which is fine, but alas the pixels are about 100 x 100 - they have to be 80 x 80 - using Paint does anyone know how to drop the dpi. Also, how do i compress it?

I use infranview. If you have infranview, then just open the picture with it, then choose Image from the toolbar and then click on Resize/Resample,
or alternatively just press Ctrl+R, once you've done that, fill in the box with your desired size.
If you don't have infranview you can download it here.

I use FastStone Image Viewer v3.5, which is also freeware, and considerably faster than most viewers available. Available from

http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

Whatever the software is, there should be resize option somewhere that would also allow to change the DPI (dots per inch); 72 dpi in this case would be ideal. Then if your avatar is line drawing (ie. not many shades), you should save as GIF (you can then specify how many colors to use: maximum 256); if it's photo or with gradients, only then choose JPEG.

Thanks to everyone who has suggested programs. i have downloaded infranview for future reference.

However, a particular shout out goes to Queen of Clubs, who very kindly sorted me out with the pic, so hats of to you and a spangly round of applause.

Cheers!

These posts make me feel like an idiot. No matter what I do I can't get an avatar to work. I have one loaded on photobucket. I have tried from my computer. I'm begining to like avatarless soon it will be a statement unto itself.

bmat wrote:These posts make me feel like an idiot. No matter what I do I can't get an avatar to work. I have one loaded on photobucket. I have tried from my computer. I'm begining to like avatarless soon it will be a statement unto itself.

Sort it out mate. You're invisible.

bmat wrote:These posts make me feel like an idiot. No matter what I do I can't get an avatar to work. I have one loaded on photobucket. I have tried from my computer. I'm begining to like avatarless soon it will be a statement unto itself.

What kind of image do you want to use? There's no technical reason why TM won't allow you to post an avatar so as long as it's within the forum size limits it should post OK.