Mac OS X 10.1: Making Your Own User Pictures (with a collection of free ones)

© Applelust Staff

Update - 10-9-01 - 64 new User Pictures added. See below. Keep 'em coming folks!

Please note: The pictures that you can get here or make for yourself can also be used in Sherlock. Create a new channel. Add your search sites. Then just drop one of these pictures in the icon area at the top of Sherlock! (The Defaults ones are a bit trickier, but more on that later.)

One of the great things about OS X is its hackability. The graphics used by the system are easy to get into and easy to enhance and change. If other parts of the Mac OS have lost out to its BSD underpinnings, one thing remains pretty easy - making your Mac YOUR Mac through various customizations. (Well, default icons can still be a bit tricky.)

One of the easiest hacks is the "User Pictutes." OS X, as a Unix hybrid, incorporates users into the system in a new way. You can now, as you know, log in and log out as a particular user, and even as root. The owner of the machine (the "administrator" in other words), can control what folders and files any user can use or even see. To get the knack of this you have to learn about "private,' "shared" amd "Users" folders, but after you work with it for a while it becomes quite simle.

To login you will presented the Login Panel (imagine that!). the screen shot above is the Login Panel. Click on any user to give the password and you're in.

One little hack you can do in OS 10 is change the User pictures. change, delete and add them. It is very simple. You'll find the default ones in /Library/User Pictures. They are tif files. Here is one of the default pictures...

The tifs are 60x56px with a transparent canvas. To archive the best effect you have to preserve the soft shadows around the picture as well as its position on the background layer. In other words, you have cut the picture within the shadow area and replace it. (There may be easier ways, but this is how I did it.) You can take a transparent 60x56 graphic and use that as well, without the shadow effect; or you can choose any background color you wish. But to preserve the look and feel of the lagoon Panel I have chosen to use the shadow area as a guide for my graphics.

I use Fireworks. If you use Photoshop the steps are similar.

Step 1: Open the graphic in a graphics program. If you are in 10.1 you can simply drag the tif to a graphic app in your Dock and it opens (well, if you're lucky, it doesn't always work!).

Once you open it, zoom in. I found that 200x to 400x zoom is good, though something larger may be helpful for some.

Step 2: Select the area of the picture inside the shadow effect and delete or cut. The area you select should be 46x42px. You are left with an empty area.

Be sure to select the area within the shadow effect.

Once the selection is cut, you are left with an empty area within the shadow guide area. You paste your pictures in there. BTW: Thisis what the Template file we provide below looks like.

Step 3: There is no step three!! Oh... wait, there is. Next you simply find a graphic and reduce it to 46x42px and paste it into the area you just cut out.

But it is not quite this simple. Make some 46x42px layers which will be used for the background colors of the graphics you use. Important: make sure that you do not move the shadow guide at all. It can cause the resulting images to look poor on the Login Panel, and especially in the scroll area of the User Preferences where you will choose these images when you define users. (To make sure they are aligned right place them the in the User Pictures Folder and go to the User Prefs. Scroll through the images and see if they are all positioned right there.)

Adding layers that will work as backgrounds for your images. May also be left transparent.

Adding several layers for different color backgrounds.

 

I found a picture of the BSD Daemon (OS X is BSD you know). I chose the white layer as a background and pasted the Daemon onto it to get this result:

I also got this Nebraska Cornhusker (it IS football season you know!), and reduced it to a manageable size with the white layer chosen as a background:

Here are some of the User Pictures I made and you can use them to your heart's content. Remember: Library/User Pictures.

Finally, when you go to Preferences/Users you can choose you new login pictures right at the bottom of the panel.

 

Pretty cool, no? My Mac is becoming MY Mac in 10.1.

Please Note: You cannot simply drag these pictures to your Desktop and use since they are gifs and not tifs. We provide a download link below.

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New series by Gort icons!!
Forrest Walter, of Gort's Icons had a blast with these things. if you don't know, Gort's Icons are some of the best out there. so he sent us 58 of them!! That's not all, he said, " I made a Photoshop Action that creates a user picture from the selected portion of a Photoshop layer. You can download the PS Action, accompanying files and such here. Thsi is .sit file, so blah, blah, blah... youy know ny now. As you can see, one does not even have to use the shadow guide as I did. One could make these same User Pictures using the shadow guide as well, however. Just take the pics here, reduce to 46x42, and paste into the user_pic_template linked below. the result is this: So you now have two ways to make them! Thanks Forrest. Email Forrest and give him a heart-felt "Thanks!!"
		Please note that we did not include titles. Let's face it, Gort has a wild imagination and even the titles get creative. We'll post them in the near future.

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Please note that below the pics with a under them CAN be downloaded as tifs by clicking on them. It willopen a new window.

User Pictures for your Login Panel
AirPort	Apple Logo	Burn Logo	Smile	Himself	TiBook	iMac	G4
Display	OS X (1)	OS X (2)	OS X (3)	Terminal	iBook	10.1
The Simpsons User Pictures (more coming soon)
Bart (1)	Bart (2)	Homer	Marge	Lisa	Maggie	Krusty	Millhouse
Others
Soren	Huskers	Palm	BSD	Patrick	spongebon	spongebob2	squidword

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We will have many more User pics for you in the future. We will also provide a template image with the Shadow guide area from which you can make your own. If you submit them, we'll post them and give you full credit. Get it here. And send yours to here.

We wish t to thank Lincoln-Shaun Sanders for the Simpsons icons we used. lshaun@uclink4.berkeley.edu. More coming...

Download the entire collection (.sit file, about 700k. StuffIt needed).

What do you think? Talk about it in our Forums...

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• STM Sports Backpack (8-9-02) Pierre Igot. How will this backpack designed for the "global digerati" stack up when Pierre puts it to the test with his mobile digital lifestyle?
• Scope Driver (8-2-02) Dr. Neale Monks. An alternative to the 'point and click' telescope control paradigm: a powerful list-based utility for Autostar and LX200 telescopes.
• Apple Final Cut Pro 3.0 (7-19-02) Michael Tate Jones. Tate reviews the video-editing powerhouse Final Cut Pro 3 and sizes up its competition. Does Final Cut Pro 3 hold its ground?
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• Watson (5-03-02) Michael Tate Jones. Tate discovers a 'Swiss Army Knife' for OS X... it's called Watson.