## Show your face

Speak Freely's Show Your Face mechanism lets people see who they're talking to. If you'd like to show people who connect an image of your face (or any other image, for that matter), create a GIF file or a 256 colour uncompressed Microsoft Windows Device-Independent Bitmap (`.BMP`) file containing the image. The image should not be larger than 128x128 pixels; otherwise it will take a long time to transfer and may interfere with the quality of audio while it's being sent. Use the Options/Show Your Face... dialogue to specify the bitmap file as "My face image file". The "Clear" button cancels a previously selected image file. If the "Show faces of other users" box is checked in this dialogue, face images will be retrieved, where available, and shown in the connection window.

When a face image is displayed in a connection window, transmission to the window is indicated by an arrow ("==>") before the site name in the window title.

If you have trouble getting your face to appear on others' machines, the most likely cause is that you've made the image file as one of the many incompatible variants of `.BMP` format such as:

> OS/2 instead of Windows
> Monochrome, 16 colour, or 24-bit colour instead of 256 colour
> RLE compressed instead of uncompressed

Make sure the image conforms to the format given above, and it should be transmitted with no difficulty. The rigid requirements on bitmap file format are imposed in order to make it easier for other, non-Windows systems, to display them.

All presently known variants of GIF files seem to work OK; since GIF files are compressed and hence somewhat smaller than the equivalent `.BMP` file, they're usually the best choice.