Can I make a user pic out of this image?

[nancylebov]

That fancy solar image I posted recently strikes me as something I'd like as a user pic (after years and the acquisition of lj by dubious people), but lj doesn't like urls that don't begin with www. Is there some way to make it work?

Also, while it doesn't look bad as a square, I'd rather keep the original proportions. Is there someway to either have it as a rectangle or add black (maybe black with a narrow gold stripe) to fill in the square?

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Copy the image to your clipboard and save it to your hard drive: LJ will be happy to get it from there.

I've always formatted my images to 100x100 pixels before uploading them to LJ user pics. When you imply that this isn't necessary and that LJ will do it for you, is one of us mistaken? (for quality's sake, I would continue to resize it myself, because I trust the tools I have to do a good job)

LJ user pics can indeed be rectangles, with no need for filling, as long as both of the dimensions are less than or equal to 100 pixels. Personally I begrudge every unused pixel out of the measly 10,000 offered, so I stretch and crop accordingly. Lots of other people like rectangles, though.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean to imply that lj would resize the image for me, but when I resized it, I got the error message about the lack of a www.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

If you try to select a userpic bigger than 100 pixels, LJ will open a page that lets you select a portion and automagically scales it to fot.

I prefer to do it myself, since I've gotten some practice in fiddling with the palette size and dithering options in Paint Shop Pro to get maximum image quality with minimum file size. I mostly do square ones, except in cases where the original image just doesn't lend itself to that (example attached to this post).

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

To set it up as a userpic, you'll want to prepare the image first (shrinking it so that it fits within the 100x100 pixel size limit). So yes, you can have it as a rectangle, as long as the largest dimension is <=100 px.

Once you've got set up to your liking, you can upload it via LJ's control panel, or whatever they want to call it, on the front page (http://www.livejournal.com/). If you're logged in, you go to Profile > Manage Userpics and it's easy from there.

Try this one

[bibliotrope.livejournal.com]

I used Microsoft Photo Editor to shrink it to 100 pixels wide. I can't add a black or gold border or stripe to it on this software, though (at least not as far as I can figure out).

[madfilkentist]

lj doesn't like urls that don't begin with www

That's just bizarre. Are you sure?

Technically, of course, a URL needs to begin with a protocol, usually "http://". But I'm assuming that you mean LJ wants the request portion of the URL to begin with "www".

[shagbark.livejournal.com]

A domain that begins with "www" is the top domain for a server. Most mischevious people don't have their own servers. A website that doesn't start with "www" might be some doofus' private Geocities (or Livejournal) page, which they might have harmful code on.

That's my theory.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

If you shrink it all at once, you're at the mercy of Photoshop's (or whichever program's) notions of sampling, which tend to make details drop out. The way I've learned to do it, you shrink by no more than 50% at a drop, then sharpen it a little, and repeat until you're down to the size you want.



Here it is, shrunk automatically in one gulp by Photoshop. (I sharpened it a little afterward, just to try and be fair about it.)



Here it is, reduced a step at a time. Dates are still illegible, and the photo still makes no sense unless you know what it is already, but it looks better. For giggles, I tried doing it one time with a cropped bit of the picture:



Still hard to make out, but a teensy bit better.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

ps: You're missing an end quotation in your html for the picture above.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Fixed.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

In the small size, I'm more interested in the beauty of the thing rather than the science, though people will get extra points for recognizing it from the apod.

Actually, I might be more interested in the beauty of the thing even in the large size.

And not that I check apod every day myself--maybe I should, both for myself and as a fairly reliable source of oooohshiny! for my lj.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reduction in stages tip. I wonder why the color comes out different in the sharper version.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

One option would be to remove the original dates and add them back in manually at a more readable size. (That's what I did, among other things, to make the animated icon attached to this post -- the original image is from Erfworld, page 10 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/erf0010.html).) However, I doubt that it's possible in this case (just too many characters to squeeze into too small a space).

(Hmmm... another option might be to expand the image to a square by adding some black space to the bottom and put a caption there.)

[whouseknecht.livejournal.com]

Is this what you were looking for?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much. That's what I was talking about, but I think I might like it better as a rectangle. How did you make it happen?

So far, I've been trying to get the image moved to somewhere useful. No progress. I've downloaded a screenshot, I think, but that doesn't mean I know how to separate the image from the page. I've downloaded GIMP and I have a Photobucket account now. All I need is the ability to move the image.

I feel as though I have a lot of power but no traction.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It turns out that I do have Microsoft Photo Editor. I'd quit searching when I found I didn't have Photoshop. That's when I downloaded GIMP.