James Spillane
A matching Facebook cover photo and profile picture looks professional and exciting. You can do so many things with it to various ends, such as making your Facebook followers laugh or just to make your profile look amazing. But how do you line up the two images and make it work? We’re here to help.
How to line up your cover photo with your profile picture
1. Screenshot your Facebook profile page: The first step is to take a screenshot of your profile page for size reference. Past this screenshot into Microsoft PowerPoint or a similar program where you can CROP the screenshot. We’ll be using our client, Rowperfect, as an example:
2. Crop your chosen picture into two images: now that you have your profile screenshot and have pasted it into Microsoft PowerPoint you can begin cropping your desired image. Detailed instructions follow this image…
- FRAME 1: mark your cover photo and your profile photo. The blue rectangle we’ve created represents the cover photo size area and the red square represents the profile picture. Remember to paste the screenshot exactly as it is and do not re-size it, even though it is larger than the PowerPoint work area.
- FRAME 2: import the image you want as your combined profile picture and cover photo. Then re-size it so it is as big as the blue and red rectangle combined. Line it up as you wish.
- FRAME 3: duplicate your now re-sized imported image, place it in the same location as its original and crop your imported image and its duplicate to be the size of the blue rectangle and red square respectively.
- FRAME 4: now you have your two images, save the big one as COVER PHOTO and the smaller square one as PROFILE PICTURE.
3. Place them on your Facebook profile page: now you have your two images you can place the PROFILE PICTURE image on your Facebook profile picture and use the COVER PHOTO image as your Facebook profile cover.
If all is done correctly your Facebook profile cover photo and profile picture will now line up together and look flash, just like the Rowperfect Facebook page!
Be creative: some interesting ideas
Here are a few ideas we found that might spark some inspiration for you…
Read more:
This article was written for Business 2 Community by James Spillane.
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Just be careful creating and designing FB profile pics around your timeline cover — keep in mind that the same profile pic will be off on it’s own when appearing in the News Feed. If it’s small or has a background the makes your logo hard to decipher, you’ll be doing damage to your brand’s reach.
I don’t know if things have changed, but the last time I tried this, I found that Facebook’s minimum size for a profile pic was larger than the size created using this method, so I had to enlarge it first, only for Facebook to reduce it afterwards …
When you create the profile picture it has to be 180 x 180, but when it up loads it will compress to 160 x 160, so a straight cut and paste job of your image won’t always line up correctly, it takes a little practice to get it right.
Thanks for all the comments everyone.
@Jay – I completely agree and that’s a pitfall to be considered.
@EastCoastJac & @Matt – strangely enough I was able to replicate this method for all the accounts I have control over (6) and it worked perfectly. If something is off though, you shouldn’t need to re-size anything. Instead try moving your Facebook cover image to line up with your profile image. This may be resolve the issue without having to re-size your image.