I spend time helping people in the SL Forum, mostly in Answers. A question came in about making a Cover Photo… a what?

SL Forum Profile with Cover Photo

When logged into the forum open your profile. There are a couple of ways to do that. Up in the upper right click your name and select Profile. Or on any forum page where you have posted click your profile image.

The Mini Profile Pop Up with Cover Photo

If you hover your cursor over your profile image it will open a small version of your Profile page.

Mini Profile without Cover Photo

If you click, it will take you to your profile. Notice in the first image in the upper right there is an item ‘Cover Photo’.

Clicking it reveals 3 options; Remove, Reposition, or Upload photo. Of course, you want to upload an image. But, what size?

Some of the regular inhabitants of the forum figured out you need an image 6:1 and under 900KB. So, I went with 1920×320. As a JPG file that makes for about a 450KB image.

I chose to combine one of the more popular images I have on Flickr, a background I cleaned up, and a new headshot wearing my Jennifer head from GA.EG.

My advice is, make the image a bit on the light side, overexposed – brightness not nude. The smaller Profile version goes darker. The full-size Profile version is OK brightness-wise. So, for a good image in both places, you’ll need to balance overexposing/lightening the original image to get a decent small image.

The Problem

I saw the Cover Image question come up because people were uploading an image and it wasn’t showing. So, people were asking ‘Hey, WTF?’ I did too.

Profile without Cover Photo

I put up my image and nothing… but 24± hours later it started showing. So, it may be a matter of patience. Or it could be a bug that coincidentally got fixed the day I uploaded… Whatever, if your image doesn’t show after upload, give it 24 hours before filing a trouble ticket with Support.