5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo

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5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Facebook Profile Photo

This is a guest post by Rob Banagale. Rob Banagale is co-founder of Neutrinos, LLC, a digital media company specializing in iPhone application design and consulting based in Boston, MA. Rob advises clients on how they can extend their marketing reach to iPhone users, including the iPhone application publishing process. He has authored a Facebook application and remains interested in the design of social media platforms.

Coolwhip hair dude.

One of the most important parts of a person's Facebook presence is their profile photo. This is displayed in the top left corner of a page. The photo can be a newly uploaded image or it may be drawn from any of your online albums.

Typically, a profile photo shows someone's face, and appears in front of the light blue-grey line that connects from the left side of the profile to the left-most tab. View an example of a typical profile page with a normal photo.



Unlike Myspace, Facebook's uses a common color and layout for every profile. This makes the site look better overall, but also limits your ability to affect the look of your profile. You can display Facebook applications on the left sidebar, and have them in tabs, but any changes to how the page's style or how it is displayed overall are limited.

Hacking the Facebook Profile Photo

There isn't a legal way to 'hack' Facebook, but there is a method to changing your profile photo to make your profile look subtly different and cooler. It isn't obvious, but the placement of a profile photo allows you to lightly innovate on Facebook's sacred profile layout.

How Does It Work?

When you create a profile photo from an existing album image, Facebook lets you crop the photo down to whatever dimensions you choose. When you visit your profile the selected photo is displayed scaled down to a maximum height and width allowed by Facebook.

The first thing you need to understand is how much space you have to play with. Facebook displays profile photos at a maximum of 200 pixels in width. If you go beyond this, Facebook resizes your profile photo down to 200 while maintaining the aspect ratio vertically. Facebook will display a photo in your profile that is up to 600 pixels in height. This means that Facebook will happily display any image as large as 200 x 600 without...

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