Web2Go

Help! How do I add a picture to my Facebook profile?

This time around Web2Go tells you how to get your best side up on Facebook to share it with the world.

Facebook is one of the most popular social networking websites on the World Wide Web (2.0). It’s a place to catch up with old friends, share photos and links and play silly games and quizzes.

In January this year Facebook estimated it had 100.7 million unique international visitors.

While traditionally, MySpace has lead the social networking site charge, Facebook seems to be very quickly closing the gap.

Even though my 13-year-old cousin Isabella has now concluded that “Facebook is really for old people” (i.e. people over twenty!) it seems that many webheads of all ages are catching the social networking bug and setting up their own Facebook profile pages.

Two questions I’m often asked by family and friends are: “How do I get onto Facebook?” and “How do I put pictures onto my Facebook profile?”

First thing’s first. If you haven’t got your own Facebook profile page and you want to get one (and you can’t view other people’s FB pages if you don’t) then you’ll need to sign up.

Once you’ve successfully logged in to Facebook you’ll need to set up your profile. This includes all the information that you want people to be able to see when they find you on Facebook. Put as much or as little info on your profile as you want (being careful not to put too much personal stuff up there – like your home address, birth date or financial details).

You don’t have to put a picture on your profile but it makes things a bit more interesting for you and your visitors if you do.

To change your profile picture:

1) Log into Facebook. 2) Hover your mouse over the space where your photo should go (there’s a generic silhouette there if you haven’t put up a photo). A ‘Change Picture’ link will appear in the top right-hand corner of the picture space. 3) You now have a number of choices. You can upload a photo (transfer it from your computer hard drive to your Facebook page) and even take a picture using a webcam. 4) Click on ‘Upload a Picture’ to upload a photo. 5) A dialogue box titled ‘Upload Your Profile Picture’ should appear. Click ‘Browse’ to look for a photo on your computer’s hard drive. 6) Navigate to where the photos are stored on your computer. When you’ve found the photo you want to use, double-click it with your left mouse button to insert it into your Facebook profile.

That’s it!

The only thing you need to be mindful of is that your photo needs to be less than 4 megabytes (MB) to be uploaded to Facebook successfully. Most photos are only around 2.5 megabytes but I always like to resize my photos before I upload them to the Web.

I use a free tool called ‘Image Resizer’ at Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP to do this but you can also check out other freebies like Irfanview and FastStone Image Viewer.

Here’s two tutorials about resizing photos with FastStone and Irfanview if you want to know more.

If you’re already part of the FB community you can find me by entering ‘Jenny Kapp’ into the FB search engine. If you’re not, why not consider signing up? Who knows? You might make some new online buddies or track down that old school friend you’ve been wondering about for years…

Next week… Help! I can’t view YouTube videos.