make a cool animated Twitter avatar
While officially Twitter has stated that they did not support animated .gif images for avatars in user's profile, there is a way to take in Twitter and put an animation as your profile picture. Read this short article and attract new followers to your Twitter by beautiful moving avatar.
Instructions
1. Searching animated .gif file in Google.
There are plenty of places where you can download creative animated pictures, the most obvious solution is to find them in Google. Go to the advanced image search and chose "GIF files" option in Filetypes section. You may refine your request with "animated" or "animation" words to get better results. Notice! You need to chose and download rather small image - up to 700 Kb.
2. Making .gif avatar yourself online
The other way to obtain cool animated avatar is to create it yourself. There are lots of easy-to-use online services, I'm using online avatar creator from Pho.to (http://avatar.pho.to). Here you can chose among more than 60 templates and all avatars will be made from your own photos. There are several types of avatar templates: at some of them you will wink, at some your eyes will swing from left side to right side, at some it will be an endless flight through your own eye. Service also has simple frames like animated flowers, hearts and other stuff and ability to create slideshows. And a set of special effects: your photo will fall to pieces or turn into puzzle or pencil drawing. You'll never get bored at this service where everything is free.
Don't forget to save your resulting animated image at your PC. Check the image size: it must be less than 700 Kb. On a page with result at Avatar Photo! service you can adjust avatar's size and add your text. I strongly advice you to make the picture smaller than 100 pix for largest side.
3. Renaming .gif file into .png
Now you have animated picture less than 700 Kb in size. Now make a right-click and chose "Rename" option. Now just change the extension from .GIF to .PNG. Make it in Windows, not in some photo editor!
4. Getting over the problems while renaming the file.
Some people can face the problem, that image file still have .GIF extension in spite of renaming. Most likely their file has the name "image.png.gif". This is because your access rights settings in Windows, but you can change them. Open any folder and in go to "Tools" -> "Folder options" -> "View" and uncheck the option "Hide extensions for known file types". Now you are able to rename your image correctly.
5. Uploading image to Twitter.
Do you already have Twitter? Of course, that's why you are reading this article. But if you don't, then spend 2 minutes for this simple procedure.
So, login to your profile at Twitter and go to "Settings" -> "Picture" section. Now upload your specially prepared image file and enjoy your animated avatar! Congratulations!
