How To Change Your Mac User Account Picture

You see your Mac user account picture every time you log in to your Mac. You can customize this image easily in System Preferences with some default images, a photo, or any graphic you want. You can choose a photo and zoom in on one part of the image. You can create your own graphics or download an image to use.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can change the user account picture on your Mac. You can customize it to be anything you want. 
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So your user account picture is the one that you see when you go to log into your Mac. You can see sometimes people use a default one that comes with your Mac. Sometimes they use a picture of themselves. You can actually use any graphic that you want. 
To customize your user account picture you want to go into System Preferences. You can get there through the Apple Menu, System Preferences, or anyway you want. Then go to Users & Groups. Here you'll see your current user icon here on the left but also a larger version here. If you move your cursor over it you'll get an Edit indicator. Then you can click to Edit. Now if you're using macOS Catalina you'll also see your icon here at the main level of System Preferences and you can edit it by clicking on it there. But it's also in Users & Groups.
Click on Edit and now you go into a mode where you can view a large version of your current image and lots of other options on the left. So the other options include Defaults which are a bunch of stock images that Apple includes, some of them going back many years. You can use these basically if you've got a few users on your Mac. You can pick one that you like and that represents you and then you can pick others for the other users as well. It's just a way to differentiate between users on your Mac. You can also go to the Camera and it will use your Mac's camera and you can take a new image. 
You can go to Photos as well. Now you may not see all these subcategories under Photos until the first time you choose it and then it may take awhile to process all those images and come up with this list here. So after you've done that you'll see all this stuff and you can go into Moments or Albums. These things are basically just to help you find your photo a little faster. You can use any image you want from here. When you do you have the ability, then, to Edit it.
So let's choose an image of me right here. You can see I'm not centered in the image. I don't maybe want to include all  the rest of this stuff but that's okay because I can zoom in using the slider here at the bottom. Then once you're zoomed in a little bit now you can drag around to center it. When you're zoomed all the way out of course you can't drag. There's no extra space. So it's important to zoom in if you want to drag around. Get it centered how you want and hit Save to make that your current image or Cancel to go back to your previous one.
You can also go to Photo Booth and look at the pictures you've taken with the Photo Booth app. Although sometimes I've noticed that Photo Booth doesn't appear and I'm not sure why. So that's a good option because you can use Photo Booth to filter images. So you can create a more custom image with some of the interesting Photo Booth filters that are there.
Now what if you want to use a custom image and indeed that's what I've done here. You notice this logo here isn't in my Photos app. It's not one of the defaults, of course. How did I get it in there? You'd think you'd be able to drag and drop an image in here. It appears that you can't. But you can! You just can't do it in this interface. So you have to go back to this level here and you can drag and drop any image directly onto the icon here. Then it goes back in and shows current on the left and the image you've just used you can zoom and reposition as much as you want and hit Save to use that. 
Which means the sky is really the limit when it comes to using a graphic. You can use anything you've got. So if you draw and you've drawn a nice character of yourself you can use that. You can download something from the internet and use that as a photo. That also means you can customize an image using any graphics that you've got. PhotoShop or Pixelmator or whatever. I can drag this image here onto Acorn and I can apply a filter to it. So let's Filter it, stylize it, use one of the interesting styles here. Create something cool and Save it out. Now if I drag this image in here I've got something that's a little bit different for my image.
Mostly these are just for you to have fun with. They only serve the purpose of allowing you to quickly identify each user account on your Mac. So a lot of people like to put a custom image there. I like to have this logo here for this account since this is my demo account for making these tutorials. Whereas my main account that I use to get my work done has my photo in it. So I use them in that way. You can use them in anyway you want with any image you want.

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Change Your Mac User Account Picture”

H. M. Miller

5 years ago

Thanks for the great info on changing user image. I’d like to now how to swap out that ho-hum desert mountain background for something more appealing.

Gary Rosenzweig

H. M.: See https://macmost.com/a-beginners-guide-to-desktop-backgrounds.html

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How To Change Your Mac User Account Picture

Comments: 2 Responses to “How To Change Your Mac User Account Picture”

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