I create or edit most all of my avatars from source material and often change them quite often so maybe I can offer some help in addition to what
Metatron72 has stated. So, I'll try to not assume the familiarity on the subject of the reader and will attempt to be complete. Since this is in the
Popular Questions & Essential Info section, hopefully this can even serve to help others in the future.
- Get a desktop image editor
- If you're on OS X you can just used Preview, as it's more than sufficient.
- If you're on Windows I would recommend getting Gimp or Irfanview. There may even be a default Windows editor.
- If you have Photoshop, obviously you can use that instead of any of the above.
- Getting the image URL or leeching from a host
Hotlinking or Leeching—the act of linking directly to a file or image on someone else's website—is considered unethical as it uses the bandwidth that someone else pays for. It is considered "stealing bandwidth" and is frowned upon. Avoid it if possible. This is not really applicable to larger sites like IMDb, Facebook, et cetera but do consider this when linking from people's personal sites because they may eventually block/break your image to protect their bandwidth. If it is a large site, feel free to link directly as they aren't hurt by the bandwidth usage since they use CDNs that are designed to serve content 24/7 anyway.
When copying your image you want to use the full URL, as in beginning with "http://" and ending with the file extension (.jpg, .png, .gif, et cetera). If you don't see the image extension the image may not resolve and show up. That said…
- The quickest way to get the URL of an image is simply to drag-and-drop it to your address bar.
On most websites, you can just drag-and-drop to get the URL of an image.
- Sometimes the above will not work, especially when the image is a part of a CSS background or dynamically served. In these cases right click the image and look for something that says "copy image address" or a menu item in the vein of "image properties" or whatever the terminology is in your browser.
- You can also use other tools to get the URL like browser "Developer Tools", extensions like Firebug or other advanced tools and look at the markup via Inspect Element in the right click menu.
- If all else fails, save the image to your desktop or take a screenshot of the image and edit it with an image editor, then upload to one of the solutions recommended below—in the Images Hosts and Cloud Host section.
- Choosing the right image dimensions and format
While I'm not sure if there is an enforced size for images here, on phpBB and vBulletin based forums most Admins often exercise their ability to set limits to image size and dimensions to avoid slowing things down on the forum. The ideal image size seems to be around 120px by 120px @ 72ppi max in JPEG, PNG or static GIF format. If you use an animated .gif, like I often do, try to be considerate and keep the size below at least 1.5mb as others will have to download these images over and over every time they read threads. Here are some general advices for editing…
note | px here means pixels
- Make sure that "constrain proportions" or "scale proportionally" or wherever the terminology is in your editor is ticked ON when resizing to avoid warping or skewing your image.
- If your image is a perfect square with equal width and height, just resize it down to 120px by 120px. It's not advised to size an image up usually unless it's only by a small amount.
- If your image isn't a square, resize it to 120px on it's longest dimension. So, for example, if you had an image that was 1200px tall by 800px wide…resize it down to 120px tall by 80px wide. Or if you had an image, say 624 tall by 1140 wide, resize it to 66px tall by 120px wide. With "contain proportions" on, you usually just have to input one dimension, the other will be adjusted accordingly.
- If your image isn't a square but you want to have a square avatar, you will have to crop the image using a crop tool inside whatever image editor you're using.
The resize panel in Preview on OS X 10.8
Example of a crop tool, in Photoshop.
- Choose an image host or cloud service.
- IMAGE HOSTS | Imgur — it's quick and has no frills. I use this for images in posts that I want no control over. If you do use this one, I'd recommend a browser extension like Imgur Upload by Matt Swain, which allows you to just upload any image you see in a browser to Imgur via the right click menu. Again, you don't want to link from people's websites directly unless it's a large company site because leeching is rude and may cause the website owner to block the image/link.
Extensions like Imgur Upload for Safari can save you from having to download and re-upload an image.
- IMAGE HOSTS | Photobucket — if you want to manage your images then this offers what Imgur offers and more. It is however a lot more involved and doesn't afford you the convenience of using Imgur or a cloud host.
- CLOUD HOSTS — Cloud hosts like Dropbox, Copy and so forth offer all the benefits of image hosts but with the convenience of managing and uploading everything directly from your desktop. Make sure you choose one of the major ones that allot you enough bandwidth that they won't block your image if it receives too much traffic hits/views.
Once you have your image URL, regardless of if it's just a link copied from someone's server or an image you uploaded yourself just put the URL into the
Offsite link field in your
Edit Avatar control panel. Make sure you have the entire URL (
for example: http://www.turdsaremadeofmeat.com/thisisafakesite.jpg). The "Avatar dimensions" field doesn't matter much unless your image is larger than 120px by 120px, in which case you'll need to specify the dimensions yourself. If it's 120px by 120px or smaller it will simply resolve to the actual size of the image. "Delete image" is there to remove your avatar period, so as to not have one. If you already have an avatar and link to a new one the old one will basically be removed anyway.
I hope that helps, in addition to what
Metatron72 posted. I did rush through a bit so expect some possible corrections/edits eventually.
copy the URL,Go back to mpc-forums i don't delete my old avatar (because in my journey of looking for the precious info someone said don't delete your old photo)paste the URL in the proper box 
I really wish we all somehow could come together and make this process easier,MUCH EASIER!
....and..... 
Thank you,thank you I've done it finally after 3 years thanks again (when I want a moving one I know who to come to
