How to: Create a custom template for your Facebook profile

With the new profile design rolled out by Facebook a few weeks ago, pictures have become specially relevant. The top image bar that displays thumbnails for the images you’re tagged in can be easily tweaked to match your main profile picture and create a more original Facebook profile.

If you want to do something similar in your Facebook profile, just follow these steps:

1. First, download and open the Photoshop template provided by Digital Inspiration, the blog where I learnt about this trick. Then open a picture of yourself that’s 700 pixels wide and 500 pixels high. Copy and paste this picture onto the PSD file. You may need to adjust the picture so that it fits the small thumbnails once it’s cropped.

2. Go to File > Save for web and Photoshop will save all the picture slices as standalone JPG files in a folder.

3. Now log on to your Facebook profile page and upload the largest image (the 200 x 500 one) plus the five 100 x 68 thumbnails generated by Photoshop to your Profile Pictures album.

4. Here comes the tricky part: first, make sure the large image is selected as your main profile picture. Then, tag with your name the remaining five thumbnails, starting by the one that should appear furthest to the right, and ending by the one that should be displayed on the left end, beside the main picture.

5. Done! Your custom Facebook profile is finished. Of course, you can also follow this tutorial with any other graphic editor and not just Photoshop. Simply slice your picture manually following the sizes indicated in the PSD template: 200 x 500 pixels for the main image, and 100 x 68 pixels for each of the five thumbnails.