By dragon, with thanks to Shayanna:
So you've seen the artwork floating around and you want a pretty picture to go with your character. Where do you find one? How do you make it work? Where did all the penguins go? Many questions go into such a venture.
First off, there are hundreds - nay! thousands - of sites that offer quality sources for images you can use for roleplaying. Fantasy, models, beasts, art or photos. So many choices, how does one decide?
I have no idea.
Finding the picture is totally up to you. After that, then I can help you!
First, once the image is located, you'll need to save it to your hard drive. You MUST. Once that's done, if you have a graphics program, you can edit the image to your heart's content*. Most people use either Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but these programs are huge and expensive to obtain. There are others out there, so look around. If you don't want to go through that effort (lazy bastards) you can potentially get the assistance of various individuals who would gladly edit the image for you.
The next step is to actually put your image up on the web for everyone to see. The difficulty with this is, most free webpage hosts now don't allow off-site hosting. Which means...y'know...your image looks good on the page, or to you, but no one else can see you. Very embarassing. Like having boxers with little dragons on them or something. But I wouldn't know.
Geocities and Angelfire as well as Homestead seem to be the best bets for putting images up, but you'll have to know the secrets to be able to show them properly.
(following taken from the 'Castle Tricks' page linked to the Message Board.)
GEOCITIES PICS
(Hats off to Kaige for informing me of this trick)
Do ye have a Geocities account and wish ye could post those pics in the Castle?
Ye can!
All ye have to do be to go into ye Geocities account, rename ye pics from "Picname.jpg" to "Picname.x"
Ye can then post ye pics in the castle by using the ".X" extension.
Do nae know how it works, but it does!
ANGELFIRE PICS
(Thanks go out to Exxy for filling me in on this one)
To post Angelfire pics in the Castle, login to ye Angelfire account.
If ye pic ends in .gif, leave it alone. it should work fine.
If ye pic ends in .jpg, rename the file so that you remove the .jpg (example.. rename 'picture.jpg' to 'picture')
HOMESTEAD PICS
There shouldn't be any special trick to these, except they now have a limit to how much you can put on a webpage. If you go over that, they'll block you until you fix it.
All of these hosts are free, and just require a sign-up process that takes, at most, 15 minutes. If you won't or can't do this, ask around and someone may be able to put your picture on their webpage. But don't count on it.
Once you've done all this, and you've gotten your personalized image up on the web, it's time to put it into your handle!
(Also taken from the Castle Tips page from the Message Board)
To Post a pic!
You can post any picture that is on the web, if you know the "URL" Universal Resource Locator, for example: ((for this, just put the splash image URL in))
Type this line: <IMG SRC="http://www.whatever.com/picture.jpg">
*For quicker loading in of pictures, it is advised that you try to keep the size of the picture files under 50k. Also to avoid unwanted pix, you can always use the esc button to stop them from loading in, while still getting all the messages.
You may hear people around referring to "bandwidth theft" in relation
to pictures. Bandwidth theft is when someone links an image in the chatroom or
in their handle directly to the original archive or site they found it in. It's
against the Chathouse rules, makes you look like a dickhead, and is all-round not
a good idea. Follow dragon's tips above on finding your own webspace to host
your images once you've saved them to your hard drive and edited them (note also
that unedited pictures, being generally big, cumbersome and unpersonalised,
make you look like a dickhead).