Google’s Gmail is getting personal with a new feature that lets you customize the visual theme and background image with your own photos, an online photo or a selection of featured images from Google+. Google is rolling out the new feature to Gmail users over the next few days so if you don’t see the feature yet it should show up soon.
How to Set Up Your Own Theme
If you decide to upload a photo, you can either drag-and-drop the photo into Gmail using a modern Web browser or you can upload it the old fashioned way by searching for your images using your system’s file browser. In my tests, uploading a 2.5 MB image went pretty quickly and I had a new customized theme in a few seconds.
Once you’ve chosen your photo the first time, you can change it by selecting the “Change your background image” link in Settings>Themes>Custom Themes.
Choosing a Photo
Before choosing your own photo, there are a few things you should consider. First of all, the only time you’re really going to see your background image is when you’re sorting through your drafts or any other folder containing just a few messages. Taking a look at the photo in your drafts folder, you will notice several Gmail items get in the way of the image. These include a copyright notice and a link to the service’s terms and privacy policies.
Gmail’s new feature also doesn’t have any advanced features like face detection or the ability to adjust the background image manually. Gmail just takes your image and, if necessary, stretches it to fit the window. So portrait-style images from your smartphone are not ideal choices for a Gmail background, but landscape smartphone photos tended to work fairly well. The best choices in my tests were relatively large photos taken with a regular camera.
Now that Google has added customizable background images to Gmail it will be interesting to see whether users take advantage of the new canvas to customize their Gmail window similar to how people have used Facebook cover photos in inventive ways.
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