How to change your photo In your Skype Profile?

That should be obvious enough, right? But I’ve learnt that sometimes the best tip is also the simplest one.

Over the weekend, my sister complained to me that after upgrading her Skpe from version 5.xxxx to version 6.xxxxx, she suddenly cannot change her photo in the profile anymore.

What she meant was that in the Skype profile, when she browsed her computer for the replacement photo and clicked to use the new photo, ……nothing happened. The new photo just refused to get uploaded by Skype.

A quick check with various online forums showed that she was not alone with this peculiar problem. Various people complained that this only happened after upgrading their Skype from version 5.xxxx to 6.xxxx. Someone claimed that the problem diasappeared after he/she reverted to the older version. The Skype support page did not help either…it says that Skype will automatically resize your photo to fit. Well,yes and no.

I took a quick look at my sister’s collection of photos in her PC and discovered that they were all massively large photos of zillion pixels. And that will probably be true of most digital camera enthusiasts…just snap and save in the highest resolution. It turns out that Skype just cannot swallow too large a picture; it will choke.

I saw that she didn’t have any photo editor on her PC. So the first step was to download and install the free Paint.net for her.

Next, I just cropped her picture to a square to highlight her closeup profile, I chose resolution 96 pixels/inch, and cropped to  about 400p x 400p. Went to Skype profile page and tried again to change her photo. Browsed the PC to pick this cropped photo, and viola! It worked! 

So the simple tip is: crop your photo to an acceptable size that Skype can accept….then it will resize to the 97×97 profile image. I do not crop to 97 x 97 because that would be too blurry. 

A simple tip that may help someone.