If you use social media, you know how daunting it can be to crop, edit and upload decent looking photos to your Facebook, Google+ and Twitter accounts. Each site has different image size requirements and most have multiple images, like Facebook with a cover photo and a profile photo.
You can always just upload something and use the rudimentary cropping tools on that particular site to put your image in the box, but if you want to create something unique or even semi-professional looking, you need to plan a little. Luckily, there are several online tools to help you quickly create your own header / profile images without using Photoshop.
I will share the list of tools by social media. There are also several tools that work with multiple social networks.
All-In-One Image Resizers
AP Social Media Image Maker is a great tool to create the perfect image for any possible image size for all possible social media sites. It has everything from Facebook to YouTube, LinkedIn, to Tumblr, to Google+ and Twitter. Just scroll down and you even get a nice little diagram showing which image it belongs to on the site.
The editing tools on the site are amazing, and it’s all completely free, no login or anything else. This is by far the best tool as it doesn’t have a lot of ads like all other sites.
Social Image Resizer Tool is a free app from Internet Marketing Ninjas. Select the file and click “Upload” to start. Then just click inside the box next to “Select Size” and a drop-down list of social networking sites will open.
As you can see, you can quickly choose from a variety of options such as Facebook cover, Facebook profile photo, Google+ badge, photo strip or cover photo, Twitter badge or header image, as well as several predefined sizes that you can also use on other sites. You can also choose your own size if you need a different size for another site like Medium, etc.
Click Finish and then click Upload to upload the image directly, or you can enter an email address and send it there. Wonderful!
Facebook photo tools
TimelineCoverBanner is a free online tool for quickly creating Facebook cover images. You can use it to create a cool custom Facebook profile that connects your profile picture and cover photo like below:
Do you want to be so cool? Well, you’ll need help getting all the dimensions you want and cropping. This is what you can use this tool for. It will also help you find the back story if you don’t have anything useful. However, if you already have images and just want to jump into editing, you can use the light or advanced editor. The advanced editor has tons of features for editing images, applying effects, adding text, and more. Please note that when you upload an image, it will not contain watermarks.
Timeline Cover Photo Maker is another free online tool with a good set of editing tools and a range of effects. It also doesn’t watermark your final image and doesn’t require you to be logged in or anything like that. Some of the free tools you see online force you to log into your Facebook account so they can update your cover for you, which I definitely don’t like.
Easy Cover Maker doesn’t have any effects or many editing tools, but it does one really cool thing that other sites don’t: upload a photo, adjust its size and position, and update the profile picture at the same time. When you place it where you want, you can upload your profile picture and cover photo separately and it will do the cropping for you.
In fact, I use this tool most often as you can just use one image and let the tool cut it out for you. Be sure to drag one of the box corners to enlarge the image. By default, when it inserts an image, it puts it in the box, even if the resolution is much higher So, to fill the entire box, you need to pull it out of the corners.
Another interesting aspect of the tool is that you can have multiple layers. You can’t add transparency and do all this fancy stuff in Photoshop, but at least you can add some photos easily.
Twitter header / background tools
With Twitter, you have even more images to worry about. You have a profile photo, header image, and background that you can change too. This can lead to some pretty creative use of images.
It’s even more difficult to sync all those images on Twitter. However, most people don’t bother trying to create one smooth image as it’s a bit tricky and probably not worth spending that much time. However, a good header image and a good background can go a long way in making your Twitter profile look that much more interesting. Here are some tools you can use.
Header Cover is a pretty simple tool that lets you start with a blank background or choose from your collection. Using this tool, you have to upload the header image and avatar separately. For some reason, you can’t resize the background, which is a little annoying. However, you can adjust the size of the sketch.
Alternatively, you can simply upload a background image and then click Upload Images. Everything that is in the area covered by the avatar will be automatically cut into a separate picture for you. If you don’t want this part of the image to be used as an avatar, you can click “Insert photo as a thumbnail” and place it above the avatar section. The main problem is the lack of a cropping tool.
Themeleon is a free tool officially supported by Twitter. If you go to the Design tab on Twitter’s settings page, there is actually a link to their site where you can choose from a variety of backgrounds and color palettes. You will need to sign in using your Twitter account, but this should be secure as it is sponsored by Twitter itself.
Free Twitter Designer is a free online tool for creating Twitter backgrounds. The tool I mentioned above is designed to create Twitter header images, which represent the section that contains your bio and your profile picture. The background is what is behind it all. Many people use the background area to post social media information, links, etc.
For Google+ cover images, you can use one of the aforementioned tools, as there are actually no separate tools for Google+ on the internet. It doesn’t really make sense either, since you can already easily create a Google+ cover using the same tools. Hopefully these tools will help you create something unique and interesting for your social media profiles. Enjoy!
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