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Upload Your Photo and Profile to Canvas Last update by State College of Florida Professor Floyd Jay Winters 01/20/2020
The Canvas Learning Management Suite allows users to upload a personal photo to their profile. This can help online classes feel more like face-to-face classes and can help teachers better recognize their students.
The first step is to make sure your photo is not too large: it should be about 300 x 300 pixels and less than 30K (see below). Photos from today’s digital cameras may be over 3000 pixels wide and over 3MB in size. See Save As, Cropping and Resizing below. Crop your photo so it not too large and so YOU are recognizable. Only a Head Shot of you. No drawings, scenic pictures or group photos.
To set your Canvas Personal Preferences and upload your Photo: 1. Log on to Canvas 2. Click on your account icon located in the top left-hand corner of Canvas. 3. Then click the "Profile" link and click on the icon for your photo. 4. You must Resize the photo (keep it less than 300 pixels wide) so that it is not too large (see below). Also Crop the photo as a HEAD SHOT so that you are recognizable.
* Reminder: It is very important that you do not upload a photo directly from a digital camera. An obvious way to reduce file sizes is to avoid inserting large graphic images and media clips. If you paste huge images into any file, the file will become huge. Screen captures and Windows .Bmp graphics are huge memory hogs. I often tell my students that .Bmp (the standard Windows graphics file type) stands for Big Memory Pig. The Internet uses .Gif (for drawings less than 256 colors) and .Jpg files (for photos with many thousands of colors). They are usually much more than ten times smaller in size than a comparable .Bmp file. If you use Microsoft Paint (Start > Paint) you can choose Save As, and under Save as type choose .Jpg or .Png to convert a .Bmp to a much more reasonable format and size.
Some numbers: Say the picture from your high-resolution digital camera is 3000 pixels wide and you want to insert a small picture into the corner of your document. When you insert a 3000-pixel 2MB image into your document, you just increased a file that might have been 100K to a file size of over 2 or 3MB (2,000K-3,000K). Add a second image and it is now about 4MB to 6MB. If you use the resizing handles to make these huge pictures small enough to fit on the page the file size is still 4MB in size, because what you really did was to make the images appear smaller, but they still retain their bit size. However, if you resize an image before you insert it, you will greatly reduce your file size. Perhaps you might choose to make it a more reasonable 300 pixels wide. 300 is 1/10 of the width of 3000, but also 1/10 of the height as well and consequently you can actually make the file size nearly 100 times smaller.
CROPPING: You can crop a photo several ways. Virtually all Photo or Paint Editors have a Cropping tool. In Microsoft Paint (Start > Paint) there is a crop icon on the Home tab.
RESIZING: Most paint programs have a resize option – In the most recent version of Windows Paint (Start > Paint) click the [Home] tab, there is a Resize icon. Other programs, such as PhotoShop, may simply be Image > Resize
Photoshop also has a wonderful feature to
optimize the file size of an image:
If you do not know what Paint programs you have on your computer – locate your image or photo file in the Windows Explorer, then right-click it and choose Open With – a list of Paint and Image programs on your machine will appear.
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