Your Face on Email and USENET Postings

XFacer

Xfacer is a simple application for cropping pictures and reducing them to 48-by-48-pixel black-and-white icons.

Why would you want to do this?

James Ashton explains it best on his web site:

X-Face is a file format used to allow a small image to be included with mail items. Typically the image shows the sender's face and is included in the mail headers labelled X-Face: . ... I devised the format to contain 48x48x1 (i.e. black and white) images in the minimum possible space. With care in production, dithered images of faces are surprisingly recognisable given their small size...

Download

The current version of XFacer is 1.0b3. You can download it here:

  Format Size
[Disk Image Icon] Disk Image file 248 KB
[Stuffit File Icon] Stuffit Archive file 179 KB

An Example

Suppose you look like this

or at least you want to put it about on USENET that that’s how you look. It happens that a picture that looks just like you comes preloaded in XFacer, but if that weren't the case, you could open any image file or URL to start working on your picture:

Here you'll see your picture centered in the workspace, and off to the left, a tinted square with gray "handles" at each corner. (The tint will match the highlight color you set in the General panel of your System Preferences, so it may not match what you see here.) You select the part of the picture you will make into your 48-by-48 icon by dragging and resizing the tinted rectangle until it covers the desired area:

As you position and resize the selection rectangle, the preview in the lower-right corner of the window shows what your icon will look like, and the text area at the bottom of the window shows the X-Face: header corresponding to that icon. You can drag or copy the header into your mail or news client--most have a preference setting that allows you to add an extra header line to the messages you send.

Note: The header data sometimes is longer than the three lines that are visible in the text area. You can still select all the text by clicking in the text area and selecting "Select All" (cmd-A) in the Edit menu; or you can drag from beginning to end, and the text area will scroll for you.

Yeah, I should break down and put a scroll bar in there.

There's more than one way to turn (potentially) tens of thousands of pixels at millions of colors each into 2304 bits of black-or-white. At the right side of the window, you can adjust the brightness and contrast of the black-and-white image XFacer uses to make the icon. Additionally, you can open a drawer at the bottom of the window to select a dithering method--the way XFacer decides whether to mark a given pixel as black or white. XFacer comes with three ditherers built-in; more are possible; all are explained in the drawer. Try each with different brightness and contrast adjustments (note that the Posterizer ignores contrast) until you have an icon you like.