Alternating Avatars

[quavec]

How do I get several pics to alternate in my avatar? You will have to tell me in non tech speak (smallest words possible ;) ).

[blueyezz74]

Carrol,
I use a program called Animation Shop to do mine in.

[pipsqueak21]

This is what I did...

I resized the pictures I wanted to include in the avatar to the 60x60 dimensions. Then I downloaded a .gif animator from the internet, and that is what animates the pictures. Different animators have different effects.

I used the trial version at this link:
http://www.ulead.com/ga/trial.htm

You get to use it for 15 days at no cost.

If you go this route, let me know if you need any help. :)

[Me&DappledDuo]

Download a 30 day trial of Animation Shop 3.0 at http://www.jasc.com/products/? (while you're at it- get the trial for PaintShopPro, too- they work very well together!).

It has an animation wizard that ANYONE can use- just follow it step by step by step. You don't even have to resize anything- although I do prefer to square photos off before animating them (PSP makes this easy!).

The ONLY tricky part you may run into is with the file size. Animations get big- FAST! The animated part of my siggie is well over 100 frames long- and it's about 14 times too big for an avatar (the file size MUST be under 10KB for use on the board). Most of the time, 3 pics will fit in a 60x60 pixel avatar (avatars dimensions need to be this size or less- the wizard helps here) without ANY loss of picture quality. But add more- and you'll have to tweak things to bring the file size down. Animation Shop has an Optimization wizard that makes this pretty easy. Remember that XP will compress file size (to a degree) for you, too- so if you're a shy bit over 10KB after using the Animation Shop wizards, you should still be okay. :)

I know PSP (well- MOST of the functions- 9.0 has some things my older version doesn't) and Animation Shop like the back of my hand- so holler if you run into trouble. :)

[quavec]

thanks for all the tips and links. I am gonna give it a try first thing in the morning and see what happens. All I can hope for is not shutting down the company network while I experiment. If all else fails, I will just change my avatar every so often! :D Yes, I know, I am hopeless. Once I get this mastered, my next techie task is to figure out how in the world I can download pics from my cell phone to my PC........to be continued.......

[quavec]

ok...well, not too bad I guess. I still need to get in there are clean up the frames but so far so good. My computer is still working and nothing got wiped out :D Thanks for all of your help!

[Me&DappledDuo]

What animation program did you use, Carrol? If you used AS- you need to select "transparent" as your background color (instead of black). What you probably want to do is crop your rectangular photos so that they're squared off- you'll see more detail in them then- and maybe slow down your frames a just a bit. ;)