To make an image your avatar, you first need to crop and or shrink it to max 150x150 pixels. Free software is downloadable to do this, e.g., Iview; I had never used it before, but just downloaded it from irfanview.com/
and tested it; I was able to easily resize the kitty kiss pic farther above to the right size for an avatar, and saved it as a JPEG.
I then went to imageshack.us/
which is free.
Browse to the image on your PC, and click ‘host it’. If the pic appears with a black bar showing its size, that’s just to let you know the size so that you’ll know whether it’s too big for an avatar. If the size looks ok, then click on ‘Don’t like the black bar on your thumbnail?
Remove it from now on’ to set your user preference, then re-upload the pic, and from now on, you’ll get images sans bar.
To use the image, for example to put it in a post like this, the easiest way for me is to copy the ‘direct link’ (last in the main list of address options). If it doesn’t give you a list of address options, it might instead say “Size: 30 Kb | Resolution: 150x123 | Name: catsavatar9oe.png | Get Links”
In that case, click the ‘get links’ and then try the option that says “Hotlink your image on forums and message boards.” I pasted that address in here and got:
(Note - this pic belongs to another Forumosan, so you shouldn’t use it.)
If that fails and the pic doesn’t show, you can try copying the last option, ‘direct link’ into the page
img171.exs.cx/img171/6545/catsavatar9oe.png
then highlight this address, and click Img, and it will insert the bookends to turn the address into a viewable pic.
To set an avatar go to your user profile, and paste the direct link address into the final item on your profile page, and it should work. Note that if you do this from a page that doesn’t allow hotlinking, it may work temporarily, until they catch you. But ImageShack allows hotlinking, so it shouldn’t be a problem.