Creating an avatar

[Rick Prentice]

I can go out in the garage and make a part, but I can't load an avatar For some strange reason, my backhoe cub avatar vanished off my profile. I've tried everything I know how, except grabbing my 10 lb sledge All I get is an X in the box. How hard can this be. I find a picture, resize it in Irfranview down under 80x60 and nothing. Does kib stand for kilobite?? Any help for this pea brain of mine would be greatly appreciated.

Rick

[Donny M]

Rick,
Try saving the re-sized picture to your desk top then up load it to the board from there. Yes, kb stands for kilobite.

[Rick Prentice]

You're going to have to talk in "Windows for Dummies" lingo. Is desk top the same as wallpaper? I resized it and downloaded it to the photohost earlier, but even the 80x60 turns out to be 10 KB. The profile says no more than 6 kib. I'm assuming "kib" and "KB" are the same. How can I change the KB size? Irfranview won't do it for me. Computers aren't my strong point. If it wasn't for farmallcub.com, I would've runover the computer with the backhoe cub along time ago

Rick

[Denny Clayton]

Rick, the desktop is the screen showing after boot-up. The one with all the icons of programs there to open. I have my avatar picture residing in "My Pictures" where I can just click on it and it open in Microsoft Office Picture Manager and edit it there. My avatar is sized to 80 X 51 as that is what it takes to keep under the limit and look proportionally correct. It comes in at 5.96 KB. Try knocking down your size until that 10 KB gets down to 6 KB and see what happens.

I'm not particularly that computer literate but my son makes his living being so. I lean on him a lot.

Good luck

[Donny M]

Rick,
One reason you may be having trouble getting the picture under 10kb is you may be using a high resoloution picture. A high res pictures has more pixels per square inch, and can still be quite large even when sized to 80 x 60. Try a lower resoloution setting on your camera and give it a try.

[Into Tractors]

Rick, I might be able to help you out. Both Jeff Silvey & Gilles were having problems with their "Animated" avatar's due to file size, but I have some software at my office that can edit those type of files as well as "Size" photo's based on file size.

The resolution may be a problem though, as in order to cut some pics down to size, it will distort them somewhat. I had to do a lot of changes to Jeff Silvey's due to the speed of the animation and the multiple colors that are used, so the output file may not be "Exactly" what I start with?

Problem is that the software is at my work office, not at home, and I normally work at the base these days.

Starting Friday however, I'll be working at the main office for about a week.

If you want to email me the picture(s) you want to use, I can edit them and send them back to you.

It'll probably be the middle of next week before I'd have the time to do it though...........MD

[Rick Prentice]

Thanks for all the help and offers. I did some checking on the camera, like Donny suggested, and found out it might have been on the medium setting. Before I could take 80 pics, now 88 is available. The pics load fast and easy on the photohost site, but just a tad big for the avatar. I'll try to take some pics in the next couple days and experiment. I'd really like to be able to figure this computer stuff out. I now have a new, bigger, faster laptop computer and even high speed internet. Surely this computer can resize a simple picture. I know it's just a computer dummy at the wheel that's behind the problem

Thanks again,
Rick

[Donny M]

Rick,
Did the new laptop come with Windows Vista loaded Vista may have a picture re-sizer already loaded. Try right clicking on a picture and see if there is listed a re-size option in the pop up.

[Rick Prentice]

Donny, yes, it has Vista, I'll check.

Thanks,
Rick

[Rick Prentice]

Well, I don't see anything by right clicking. I'm sure I've added to the issues by loading several programs in an attemp to solve my problem. I have the Cannon picture program, Adobe photo deluxe, Hemera photo, HP photo, Picasa, and Irfanview.

Rick

[Donny M]

Try to re-size the picture with infranview and save it to the desk top where you can readly see it. Once you have it up loaded to the board you can move it anywhere you like. Good luck

[Jerry M]

Also, a lot of the problem may lie in the format inwhich you are saving the picture. JPEG format is always much smaller in kb's than say Bitmap, TIFF, etc.. So, when saving a picture that has been edited, always click on the "save as" button and choose JPEG.

Jerry