Facebook announced Jan. 24 that it will be moving all users to the timeline format in the next few weeks. Although the change will be mandatory soon, you can make it early as some users have been doing since it was launched in September. Timeline is the new Facebook “wall” and highlights your personal information based on when it happened.

The biggest visual change included in Facebook timeline is creation of a cover photo. When someone lands on your page they not only see a small square profile image but also a large photo that you have selected for the top of your page. The shape can a little intimidating and includes a hole where the profile image rests. But you can crop or create your own timeline cover photo in just a few minutes. Follow along as we take a look at some great examples and advice for creating the perfect cover photo.

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Select a Cover Image

Technical Specs

The cover photo covers the width of the timeline but does not change size based on browser width. It remains 720 pixels wide. The photo is 265 pixels deep, but gains a little added depth with the addition of the profile photo box. Because of the size requirement, Facebook recommends uploading a high resolution photo for the cover image and acknowledges that all photos, especially those will low resolutions, can be used as a cover photo.

But those numbers might be a little hard to work with. A standard photo print is 6 inches wide by 4 inches high. For comparison, the Facebook timeline cover image aspect ratio is about 4 inches wide and 1.5 inches high. For your cover photo you will crop nearly half of the vertical space out of the image.

You do not have to have a pre-cropped image available in Facebook to create the cover photo. As long as any photo is wide enough to cover the space, Facebook will let you drag the photo within the cover image box for use. But just any old picture is not going to make a striking cover image. For a timeline cover with pop, you need to take the extreme horizontal aspect ratio into consideration.

Crop a Photo

Sort through your digital images to find something that you think represents you well. It can be a large headshot, you and a group of friends or a photo from your travels. When looking at photos, keep that super-horizontal shape in mind and remember that part of the bottom left of the photo will be covered.

Open the image in photo editing software such as Adobe Photoshop and set cropping constraints. With the Constrained Crop Tool, you can see exactly what your photo will look like before cropping. Many find it easier to work using the proper aspect ratio in inches. Select the crop tool and then select 4 inches for the width and 1.5 inches for the height. (You will shave a sliver off the top or bottom of the photo using this method.) Crop using full resolution.

Save your and upload to Facebook. You do not have to shrink the image to 720 pixels before uploading and remember to upload using high resolution. When adding a cover photo for the first time, click “Add a Cover” on your timeline; to change an existing cover photo, select “Change Cover” in the bottom right corner of the cover photo.

Create an Image

You can also create an image for your cover in the same way you would crop. Start with a blank canvas that is about 4 inches wide by 1.5 inches high at a high resolution (300 dpi or higher).

Remember to leave space for the profile photo. It is positioned in the bottom left corner of the cover image and sits near the left corner and mortises into the image.

If you create your own image, you may consider adding a watermark or digital signature, such as a website address somewhere on the image. That way others are less likely to steal your work if you do not intend for it to be available for public distribution and if it is stolen, you will still get credit for the design.

Download an Image

A variety of websites are beginning to post Facebook timeline photos for download.

The Detroit Free Press posted one just for Lions fans on their Facebook page. Designers at the newspaper created the timeline image with fans in mind. Using your profile photo you are almost inserted into the cover photo. They also used it as an opportunity to push branding as well, incorporating their logo into the image.

Several other websites, such as WhataTimeline.com and fbProfileCovers.com have a variety of premade, pre-cropped cover images available for free download.

What Works Well

Look for images that are sharp and crisp when selecting a cover photo. Remember this picture is going to be large and details will show. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg uses a tight crop of a dog; Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow uses a photo from a game.

Pick something unique. Although there are a lot of ways to grab timeline cover images, they will not really reflect what you do. If you are not comfortable with a giant photo of yourself, showcase some of your work or create an image just for Facebook. Comedian Dan Cook uses his image to promote his work.

Remember the placement of your profile photo. Select a cover image that uses space well. Opt for something that has the “meat” of the picture to the right or top of the photo so that the square cutout does not cover the image being showcased. TV personality and former model Tyra Banks’ page uses the space well with her face positioned in one side of the cover photo.

For a twist on the cover photo and profile photo combination, try to merge the images in a unique way. Facebook user Enri Pedernera created an image where he was part of the popular game Angry Birds and Mohammad L. Azzam created another fun image linking his profile and cover photos.

A Few Things to Avoid

Avoid images that are pixelated, such as the cover photo from former NFL player and current Fox analyst Michael Strahan. The placement of the cover photo is also distracting and the profile photo ends up in a quite unfortunate part of the cover photo. Strahan’s image is in the top left above this profile picture and the part of the image where the eye is drawn contains no visual information that would suggest the photo is of him.

Stay away from images that might be offensive or showcase you or your work in a negative light. Also, avoid images that are widely distributed such as those shared on current Facebook walls or in mass emails. The profile image is visible to the public, according to Facebook, as are profile images or past profile and cover photos.

Conclusion

Facebook’s new timeline feature is about a lot more than just photos and while the reviews are mixed, you can get ahead of the curve by hopping on board with an impressive image. It only takes a few minutes and a little photo editing.

Remember that the image you choose is a representation of your digital self and should be considered carefully. Even though most of your profile may be limited to friends, the cover image is not. Take a peek at what your friends and groups you like are doing with their cover photos to help spark a little imagination.

Facebook is giving users seven days to preview their own timelines before they go public. So take a couple days to experiment with different photos and find something that works best for you.

iFlickr Review

By way of a basic introduction, iFlickr is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily find free images on Flickr and insert them into your blog post while automatically putting the attribution link underneath. It can save you quite a bit of time when looking for related images to your blog post, but doesn’t satisfy the requirement you may have for putting your own personal images on your blog (we’ll cover some methods for doing this later on).

Here are some of the various bits we liked and didn’t like so much about iFlickr:

The Good

• iFlickr makes it very easy to search for images as you’re writing
• It gives you more flexibility and precision than other plugins which attempt to automatically find related images
• It’s a very simple way to add some graphical content to a news article or blog post
• It’s fairly easy to use CSS to customize the way the image appears
• It’s completely free!

The Annoying

• iFlickr only works with PHP5. This may be fine, but not all servers come with this by default
• You can’t choose to only show your own images
• It can be a bit tricky to get working correctly (it took us a while)

If you’re looking to use an appropriate Flickr photo with your blog posts on a regular basis, iFlickr is definitely a good way to go. However, if you’d like to mix things up in a different way, trying one of the following might be a better option:

Other Flickr/WordPress Plugins

• WordPress Flickr Manager – This is a very fully fledged offering, which lets you search for both personal and public photos and insert them into your posts. It’s not as simple as iFlickr, but you might appreciate the bigger set of features.
• Flickr Photo Album – This plugin allows you to add a set of photos to your site as an album. Rather than picking one or two images, you are able to display a whole collection. Great for showcasing screenshots, or your holiday pictures!
• FlickrRSS – This lets you display a selection of your Flickr images as a sidebar widget. There are some useful advanced options for customising the display exactly as you want it.

We’d be really interested to hear about any other plugins which you find useful for integrating Flickr with your blog – drop us a line below!

What exactly does Cutcaster offer, and why are you unique?

Cutcaster offers unique royalty free images, stock photos, stock footage and stock photography for advertising, publishing or web design. We have combined a Flickr-type community with a Getty-type licensing model but turned the old licensing model on its head. In my old job trading stock on Wall st. I saw what electronic markets and cutting out the middleman did to our markets and I applied those efficient market elements to what I saw as an outdated licensing model.

We are the first licensing platform to let people set their prices for a high resolution file, use a patent pending algorithm to help them find the correct market price or let buyers buy ala carte, on demand or bid on content they want so they can name their price or licensing terms directly with a seller. That seller has the option to accept, reject or re-submit a new offer back to that interested buyer. We also offer buyers a way to request custom content from the community of Cutcaster members through our ProjectRequest area. Cutcaster is an open platform and anyone can join, learn and participate in the community and marketplace.

For how long have you offered the service?

The site has been researched and developed over the last 3 years but we launched our Cutcaster beta site in April of this year. We are a very new service but have been growing extremely fast. I left my trading job on Wall st. in January of this year to focus on Cutcaster full-time as the demand and time commitment became too much to try to do with two jobs.

Which two design features of the site are you proudest of, and why?

I am proud of how easy our site is to use but I am very proud of our negotiation platform called My Marketplace, which allows buyers and sellers to seamlessly negotiate on pricing and licensing terms much like a stock exchange. Sellers can now get hard data on how to price their content and where demand lies for their work. Buyers can directly buy or bid for content which allows them to name their price or buy extended rights like exclusivity over a certain time period or geographic region. The platform is simple to understand, easy to use and the negotiations happen very quickly between buyers and sellers.

I also really like the layout of our media details page which clearly lays out the details surrounding any media file uploaded to the site and is set up to allow users to easily interact with the different features of the site like immediately buying, bidding for content, adding content to lightboxes (we call them clipfolders at Cutcaster), reporting copyright infringements, downloading comps to show clients, requesting different file sizes and the ability to virally send your work to multiple networks to get more traffic and sales. Here is an example of one of the media detail pages, http://www.cutcaster.com/viewmedia/view/100027215/Photo.

Could you give an overview of the technology used to power the site?

Cutcaster is written/coded in PHP using a web application framework called CodeIgniter. Other scripting codes used would include Javascript and AJAX. It uses the world’s most popular open source database, MySQL to store data and other information. The site utilizes Amazon’s web services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for web-scale computing and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage of files.