When Customising Your Own Twitter Profile

Joe Tobias Intro To Online Media BMT

When customising your own Twitter profile, it is important to take into consideration the specific requirements of the website for optimal display, in this case the profile photo. As mentioned on the screengrab, the recommended dimension is 400x400. This could easily be done using Photoshop, using image size tool, you can specifically change the size to

any size of your liking.

Here is a screengrab of the process. By doing this, you are minimising the file size of the photo, saving up to 20mb of space depending on the file format of the photo. This is important as for some websites, you only have a limited amount of file size to be able to upload.

1. http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/whats-the-difference-between-a-gif-a-jpg-and-a-png-file/#ixzz3TGA6F3zr

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/whats-the-difference-between-a-gif-a-jpg-and-a-png-file/#ixzz3TGA6F3zr



Another important consideration to take into is the file type you will be saving the images to, for Twitter as stated above, it supports PNG, JPEG, and GIF.

JPEG, is a widely used file format for photos, though this format at extremely large resolution can be very good, it does tend to compress files, losing on quality of the image, but taking less file space. PNG on the other hand is the lossless format of a photo file, it tends to be very big in file size, because it doesn’t compress the image, thus resulting in better quality photos. PNG also has the capability of transparency, while JPEG does not, this can be useful when creating images, to go on top of other images, as it minimises the work that needs to be done. GIF is mainly used for the animation side, this file format can be bothersome as they are extreme large in size, even in low quality.

An article by Digital Trends explains fully the difference between the three “JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs have benefits and limitations, and it’s more important to know when to use each file type. As a general rule, you’ll want to use a GIF whenever the image is to be animated. Beyond that, JPG compression tends to create smaller file sizes at the cost of image quality. However, PNGs are better for capturing lossless images and in situations where minimizing file sizes isn’t of utmost importance. Ultimately, situational considerations should be weighed heavily when deciding which of these file types you should use.”1

Here are two screenshots of the two different file formats comparing their file size at 400x400, though the difference may seem minute, this will highly differ in a bigger image.








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When Customising Your Own Twitter Profile