It takes less than three minutes to put a ‘cover image’ in your new Facebook Timeline page, and our screencast shows you step-by-step how to do it. In the video, we use Picasa, but if you don’t have it, you can use any tool you’re familiar with. If you don’t have anything, then Picasa is free, comes with online storage and has many great features.
Transcript:
In order to aid accessibility, we aim to provide transcripts of all our screencasts.
We’re going to select, crop and upload a picture for Facebook’s new timeline feature. This is where the picture goes, in this space at the top here. There’s nothing there at the moment.
But first, we need to select a picture, so we’ll go to our image management program, which in this case is Picasa. That looks like a good one there, so we’ll double-click on that, and so that’s a good one for the timeline shape, because it’s got room at the top and bottom to crop.
So we’ll go to the crop tool here, and you can see that we’re presented with a list of predefined default dimensions, and none of them are suitable, so we need to create a custom one, and we do that here ‘Create Custom Aspect Ratio’ and the dimensions are 851 by 315.
Eight hundred and fifty one is very important to get right, because if you don’t, it can lead to the picture being uploaded with lesser quality than you’d like.
So we’ll call it ‘Facebook Timeline’ and once we’ve clicked OK, that will save that dimension in the list of drop-downs over here, and we can choose that every time we want to upload a timeline picture. So that’s that done.
We’ll click at the top left with the left mouse button, and drag down to the bottom right and let go.
You can then move that around, and once we’re happy with that, click ‘Apply’, and that’s your picture cropped.
Now we need to save it, and we’ve got to be careful that we don’t save over our original here, so we’ll ‘Save As…’ and we’ll call it ‘fb-timeline’, and we’ve got a folder in here specially for this, and that’s it.
That’s it saved, we’ll go back to our Facebook page, we’ll click ‘Add a cover’, and there’s just a reminder of what you can and can’t do on your Facebook cover image. And we’ll click ‘upload’.
There’s our picture, double-click on it, we’ll see it uploading, it’ll take a couple of seconds, well a few seconds. And there it is. It says ‘Drag to reposition cover’ but because we’ve cropped to exactly the right size, we don’t need to do that.
Click ‘Save Changes’, and that’s it saved, and all we need to do now, when we’re happy with that, is click ‘Publish’, and that’s it live.