Creating a Social Media Profile Picture With Mac Photos

You probably have dozens or hundreds of photos in your Photos Librar you can use as social media profile pictures. Learn how to easily find the best ones, crop, adjust and apply filters, and create great social media profile pictures that are ready to use.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create a social media profile picture from a photo in your Mac Photos Library. 
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So most social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and so on they allow you to create a profile picture. Usually a square photo that you can upload and that's what everybody sees when you post something or comment on something. Most people usually just upload any old photo and then use the tools on the social media site to crop it and adjust it. But you can create a better profile picture using the Mac Photos App. Make it already to go so you could upload and use it on any social media platform. 
So let's launch the Photos App. The first thing you need to do is find a good photo of yourself to use. A trick to doing that is to use People. So People will show you the people in your photos library. It will identify everybody by face and if you've been keeping up with maintaining this then usually you'll find yourself as one of those people. So you can go into that and then you could see yourself there. Now if you haven't been keeping up with it you may first want to go all the way to the bottom and then use Confirm Additional Photos so you can get more photos of yourself into this grouping. Then go back up here, but scroll down to where it says Photos and Show More. Now click Show More and it will change this into a grid with all of the photos in the collection. Now you want to go here, where it says Photos, Faces. Photos will show the complete photo for each one. But if you switch to Faces it will zoom in on the face in the photo. So now you can look at all of the photos of you and pick one that you think will make a good profile picture. 
So I'm going to pick this one right here and use that. Now if I were to upload this directly it will look just like this. I'll have to crop it or maybe settle for my face being kind of off-center. So let's work with it in Photos to make it a better profile picture. I'm going to go over here to Edit and the first thing I want to do is Crop it. Since most social media networks use square photos and most photos you take are not going to be square you want to crop to be square. So go to Crop and then on the right here open up the Aspect Ratios here and select Square. That will select a square cropping. Now you can click and drag the photo left, right, up, and down. You can adjust the corners here to change the size to get yourself right in the middle of the square photo. Now you want to make sure you don't get too close to yourself because a lot of social media networks will crop out some of the stuff around here and it doesn't make a good photo when you're a little too close. So you kind of want to stretch the edges as much as you can while still kind of getting yourself close enough to the center. So after adjusting a little bit I'm going to use this. Just like that.
So now that I'm done cropping I'll go over to Adjust and use some adjustment tools. Now the first thing you may want to try is just using the automatic adjustments. It's this button right here. Click that and that might be all you need. It might look good enough at that point. I'm going to go in and adjust some things directly. Under light here I'm going to open up Options and I'm going to adjust the shadows because I'm wearing a cap here and it creates a shadow on my forehead. So I'm going to brighten up the shadows which will help with that somewhat. I also can adjust some other things. I like to adjust maybe Brightness to make it brighter and Contrast  as well. For a profile photo you might want more contrast than you normally do. You can play with other things like Brilliance, for instance. Just get the effect that you want. Also, take a look under Color. Under Options here you've got Saturation. Now if you want to have brighter colors go to the right. If you want to make it more like black and white go to the left. All the way to the left is completely black and white. If you're okay with that kind of effect you may want to actually forget about Color here and go to Black and White and then just use any of these options here or this line here and it will instantly convert it to black and white and allow you to adjust it. 
Next you may want to use the Retouch Tool. So you go in here and click there and then you could smooth out parts of skin and make your photo look a little bit better. Then I'm going to go to Filters. Now, most of the time you might just want to stick with the original. No filters. But try out some of these filters and see what you get and every once in a while you get something that looks pretty good. Maybe not as a regular photo. Something you want to print out or show to somebody but as a profile picture it might have a really cool look that you want to use for that social media platform. So I'm going to use Vivid Warm right here. You can always adjust the amount of the filter for each one. 
Now finally I'm going to go back to Adjust and the very last thing in adjustments is Vignette. I'm going to use that and it's going to create this circle around me. If you go to the right it will create a dark circle. To the left it will create a light circle. A lot of social media profiles already crop things into a circle so using this effect might help it look better in a circle. But even if it's going to use the whole thing it might still be nice to have some of this effect. It just depends on your personal preference. So now Done and now I've got my photo right there. If I ever wanted to compare it to my original I can go back into Edit and if I click right here that's the original photo and if I release the mouse or trackpad it shows me the photo with all my adjustments. 
Now the next thing I want to do is just export it for use. So you can go to File, Export and then Export my Photo and export like that. Or you can just drag and drop. So I can drag and drop right here to the Finder, to a Finder window or to the Desktop and I'll get the file. I probably want to rename it here from the default name and I can use QuickLook and see there's the nice profile picture. Now I'm ready to upload that and use that in various different social media networks and, of course, you can also use it right on your Mac here. Go to Apple ID and then go to your Apple ID Profile picture, right here. If I were to drag this in I could actually use that as my profile picture for my Apple ID. Then if you like you can return to People, right here, go back in and then look at other photos that might make good profile pictures. Maybe save a collection of them to switch it out from time to time. Remember editing a photo is nondestructive. It always has the original. So after you carefully created your profile picture you can go back into the photo here, go to Edit and then click Revert To Original and it will go right back to your original photo. That never goes away. So you can create a profile picture from a photo you have in your Library without worrying about permanently changing the photo. You can just revert to it once you're done and have created your profile picture. 
Nope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 10 Responses to “Creating a Social Media Profile Picture With Mac Photos”

Kent Heaps

3 years ago

Gary, At first I was able to click on my picture to follow your prompts. Something happened and now my picture folder is not there any longer. What can I do to get my picture/folder back on the "people" icon?

Gary Rosenzweig

Kent: Do you mean you don't see yourself as one of the people anymore? Perhaps you scrolled down? You could have deleted it, but that takes a few steps. Hard for me to tell what you are seeing.

Gary: Yes, that is what happened. I no longer see myself as one of the people. What can I do to remedy this?

Kent: Go to a Photo with you in it. In the View menu make sure Show Face Names is on. Click on the "unnamed" under your face and name it. Then go back to People, to you, and scroll to the bottom to confirm more.

Thanks Gary! That brought my picture back up on the group of People. I appreciate your help! The only thing that I notice now is that when I click on my photo in the People group, none of my photos are are showing up that were showing up previously. I'm not sure what I did to cause this. Is there a way to once again link all of my photos to my photo that is once again in the People tab? Thank you.

Kent: Scroll to the bottom and use "Confirm Additional Photos."

Gary, when I do that it indicates that there are no further photos of me. I must have really messed this thing up! Oh well, what ya gonna do? Thanks for trying to help me out of this predicament.

Kent: You can go into more photos, find yourself, and assign a name. Try that a few times and then try to "Confirm" more again.

Hi Gary, one thing I did notice today is that somehow or another, in playing with this yesterday I seemed to have combined my picture in the People tab with another individual in the People tab. When I click on this other individual, in the People tab, all of my pictures are there that were there previously along with this other person. Is there any way that I can separate myself from this other person in the People tab? Is it possible to rename this People tab to contain my name?

Kent: Ah, so that's what happened. You merged your group with that other person. Just renamed that to you (click on the name) and then go through it and change the name on the photos that aren't you.

Comments Closed.

Creating a Social Media Profile Picture With Mac Photos

Comments: 10 Responses to “Creating a Social Media Profile Picture With Mac Photos”

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