Profile Images are important not only for your eyes only, it is important as Google Web Search and others shows up your profile image with the search results. If you are not sure about the Google Web Search and others shows up your profile image with the search results part, please read our articles like Google Authorship Confirmation Email, rel=author and rel=me in WordPress and important article on Authorbox or Author Info Box in WordPress. These are very sophisticated part of SEO and without the Author himself / herself can tweak, they will not appear because most of the SEO experts have pathetic academic record to get a simple job, SEO gave them a gold mine because they applied trial and error methods, nothing else and most good Authors has no extra time to invest on backlinking one self. However, after 5 years or so, such need of pathetically huge backlinks now will have very little value as Google is changing their algorithm very fast to erase this SEO expert system and quite obviously to force to use Google Adwords to fetch more money. So both the good Authors and Google will get benefit in future that has started now.
Most important word about Profile Images is – use only one image of required size all over the web, social networks etc. and do not change them frequently. If you change them, you need to change all of them. This statement about Profile Images is not valid for very popular person like a rock-star.
Sizes of Profile Images For Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus
All major Social Network uses a square image for Profile Images. Using a 512×512 pixel sized jpeg format, properly compressed image, usually is sufficient to allow these social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus to show your image. Alternatively, you can resize yourself to specific sizes.
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For example, for Facebook Profile Images, here is the official guide regarding the sizes :
1 | https://www.facebook.com/help/315809258465467/ |
Or Twitter :
1 | https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/users/profile_image/%3Ascreen_name |
As you can see, the basic thing is a square picture. 512×512 pixels is a safer size as Google Plus requires a bigger finer quality picture as Profile Image and 512×512 pixels is the accepted maximum size of thumnail on most operating systems. Definitely you can use a bit bigger too.
Profile Images That Works : Tips For Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus
If you search in YouTube with my name, you will see my universal profile image :
If you search with Darren Rowse, you will get this Profile Image :
What we want to say, the images should be of professional grade with proper post processing and usually all uses Candid Photographs as Profile Images – a part of candid portrait photograph usually looks great. You can watch this video on YouTube to learn how to do cropping, basic editing of a photograph in Adobe Photoshop.
