Feature Update: Indyish Profile Pictures

As an Indyish member, one of the first things you might try to do would be to upload a picture to your profile page (and maybe write up something cool for your bio text area.)

Now, if you’ve been with us from the beginning you probably remember that we didn’t always have this basic feature. Then, once we made the feature available to our members, we started getting reports of a bug that made it impossible for Internet Explorer 7 users to upload a picture. As a larger numbers of users began to upgrade and use IE7 we eventually set out to stomp this frustrating bug. And we did. For the last 6 months or so, everyone has been able to upload a picture to their profile page (although not everyone has - yet.)

Still, our most recent update to the profile pictures feature was an important one..

Profile Pictures are now resized and cropped automatically when your upload them.

That means: no more stretched profile pictures, no more oddly shaped ones, no more squished ones, no more massively slow ones. You won’t have to open up Photoshop or Gimp to edit, crop, compress, or resize your image either. Just upload it - as is - and it will show up as a perfect square (200px by 200 px).

- BEFORE -

- AFTER -

In addition, all previously uploaded profile pictures have been resized, compressed, and cropped (if necessary). So please take a look at the current picture on your indyish profile page and make sure that it looks o.k. You can get to your profile page by clicking on the link called “profile” at the top-left corner of any page (once you are logged in). Under certain circumstances, some pictures may have been cropped in a way that doesn’t look quite right.. such is sometimes the case when things are done automagically and under the supervision of Tristan’s gerbal (what ever happen to that little guy from the Team meeting?)

Pictures that were taken in such a way as to have the main subject (eg: your face) framed off to the left, right, top, or bottom are particularly susceptible to bad cropping. If you find that your profile picture has indeed been cropped in a bad way, fear not! We have included a small link (on your profile page, just under your profile picture) that leads to a backup copy of your original (uncropped) profile picture. Ofcourse, you have to be logged in to see it. You can click on this link, and then download your original profile picture to your desktop (right-click on the image and choose save as, or, something equivalent.) You will then have to crop the image yourself, centering the main subject of your photo (for example: crop away all the blackness from the left of the picture) - then re-upload it.

Anyway, if you have tried to upload a picture in the past and encountered a problem, please give it another go as we have made several improvements to this over the course of the year. Indyish supports most versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari web browsers. If you are still having a problem, go ahead and contact us at: help @ indyish . com. Indyish is a group effort and chances are you are not the only one facing any given problem, so you’d be doing a service to all those people by reaching out to us.

Finally, we encourage everyone to update their profile page as often as they can because we have a new feature on the Networking page called: “Featured Artist” and having an interesting profile page has a big influence on our selection process. Being the Featured Artists means more traffic to your profile page, which means more exposure, more people get to see what it is that you do, and if you have products for sale, more customers get to buy up your stuff! If you’ve jazzed up your profile recently and want to be Featured on the Network page, or in our Newsletter, get in touch about that too!