PostPoints tip: Square away profile pictures

A lot of Web sites (ours included) now invite their users to post profile pictures to adorn their accounts. But if you upload a photo that doesn't meet their size recommendations, they may not cope well. You could find that your profile photo has been crudely squashed or widened to fit its standard format, leaving you looking weirdly skinny or fat. Something like half of the profile pictures on Foursquare, for example, seem to have suffered from this unkind treatment. To avoid that, save a square version of your desired portrait--unless, of course, a site specifically requests some other proportions. You can easily do that in such photo-album programs as Microsoft's Windows Live Photo Gallery, Google's Picasa or Apple's iPhoto, but any image-editing program should suffice.