Skype® for Dummies®

Chapter 5. Getting Personal

In This Chapter

• Personalizing your profile with graphics

• Creating avatars

We all like to make our mark, stand out in a crowd, and establish a unique identity. Broadcasting your personality to the world on Skype is not only fun but also may be a useful strategy if you use Skype as a business communication tool. Either way, you can find choices within the Skype program as well as third-party add-ons that allow you to strut your stuff. Personal choices include what logon name to choose, how much to say about yourself (covered in Chapter 2), and whether to post a photo, logo, or an avatar to show your face to the world? Decisions, decisions, decisions. It's up to you to make them, but it's up to this chapter to describe your choices and how to set them in motion.

Personalizing Your Skype Profile with Graphics

If you don't select a photo or image, Skype automatically inserts a cartoon-like "ball headed" icon for you. If you don't have a photo or artwork, you can use one of the ready-to-use icons that Skype provides (see Figure 5-1). When you click the Change button in your profile, the My Pictures window appears.

These images are located in the My Skype Pictures directory of the My Documents folder.

If you are creating your own graphic, you can use JPG (.jpg) files or bitmap (.bmp) files. The ready-made images installed with the Skype software use PNG (.png) files, so PNG files are also acceptable.

When you use an image, Skype automatically scales your picture to ...