Use Picasa to find your avatar / headshot for Twitter, etc...

Many people stress over a picture to use as their avatar on sites like Twitter.  Often one of the following happens:

• You stay with the default avatar, while waiting on that perfect picture.  As a result there are way too many colored bird icons on twitter.  This screams newbie.
   
• You take some quick shot with their cellphone, which looks like...well it looks like a quick shot from a cellphone.
  
  
• You upload a fullsize photo, which makes it pretty hard to tell who you are.

There is a quick and relatively painless solution to finding a decent headshot.  Install Picasa (Google's photo software) from www.google.com/picasa.  The latest version (3.6) includes face recognition, and it is remarkably accurate.

I setup Picasa on my PC, and it immediately began adding all the photos in the My Pictures folder.  Once all the photos had been added, Picasa starts scanning your pictures for faces, grouping the faces that it believes are the same person.  It will then display headshots of everyone in your photos.  Next, tell Picasa which headshots are you.  You'll only need to do it for 5 or 6 photos, then it can recognize you.  Yes, that may seem a little scary, but hey, the FBI has been doing it for years.

Finally it will show you a nice long list (assuming you have a lot of photos) of just your head in all your pictures.  You will find angles, looks, hairstyles, and most importantly, non-posed natural shots that you could have never captured on purpose.  Natural shots are important, especially if your posed smile looks fake.  You may even discover your best side in a completely random picture.  Perhaps a photo of you in a group turns into a great avatar when it's zoomed in on just you.

Mine isn't perfect, but it is better than the default avatar and anything else I had taken to be an avatar, so until that perfect picture comes along, I'm happy with my Picasa pick.

Here's my current avatar:

And here's the photo it came from:

I definitely wasn't thinking avatar when I took this shot, but it ended up working out pretty well.

Now for your amusement, here are the headshots Picasa pulled together from all my photos.  The one on the top-right was my wife's choice :-)

Oh, and although some photos may look like it, I'm not intoxicated in any of these photos.  Maybe surprised, sleepy, blinded by the flash, but that's about it.