How to hack your Facebook profile picture

If you want to ‘reface’ your Facebook page, here’s how you do it.

• You’ll need to have activated the new Facebook profile page – if you have, you’ll see your basic biographical information at the top of the page and, below that, a photo strip of five recent photos that have been tagged with your name.

• You’ll also need a photo that’s at least 692 pixels wide – that’s the width of the page from the left-hand edge of your profile picture to the right-hand edge of the photo strip.

• Now you’re ready to get started. Crop your photo to 692 pixels wide, based on how you want it to appear on the page. The left-hand side of this image will be your profile pic and the right-hand edge will appear at the end of the photo strip. Let’s call this image your Base Photo.

• Next, create your new profile pic by taking a crop of the left-hand side of your Base Photo. Start in the top left corner of your base image and, moving down and right, make a crop that’s 180 pixels wide and 540 pixels high.

• Now we need to create the images for your photo strip. The profile pic you’ve created will extend 20 pixels higher on the page than your photo strip so to create the photo strip you’ll need to start the crop 20 pixels below the top of the image. So, from the right-hand edge of the Base Photo, 20 pixels from the top, take a crop that’s 492 pixels wide and 68 pixels high. This crop will almost meet the right-hand edge of your profile picture but not quite – there is a 20 pixel gap between your profile pic and the photo strip. It’s important to leave this gap if you want the final profile page to look right.

• Still with us? Good. Now you need to chop the photo strip image you’ve created into five pieces. The images in the photo strip are separated by a line two pixels wide so you need to make sure you leave those gaps. Essentially, what you need to do is this: starting from one side of the 492×68 image you created in step 6, crop an image that’s 96.8 pixels wide and 68 pixels high, then leave a two-pixel gap, crop another 96.8×68 image, leave a gap and so on. When you’re finished you should have five small pictures.

• That’s the difficult bit over. Now you need to upload the images to Facebook. Set the image you created in step 5 to be your profile picture but don’t tag it with your name. Then tag the five images you created in step seven. The order in which you tag them is critical: you have to tag them from right-to-left based on the order in which you want them to appear on the page. So the image that you want to appear on the far right should be tagged first and the far left image should be tagged last.

• Now all you need to do is tell your friends to come and admire the handywork on your profile page.

It might take a couple of goes to get this right but once you’ve worked through the instructions once, it should be easier for you to adapt them to suit the image you want to create.