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How to place pictures in Facebook chat

Inserting a picture into your Facebook chat is as simple as typing out your name. Here's how to do it.

Jason Cipriani
Jason Cipriani
Jason Cipriani Contributing Writer, ZDNet
Jason Cipriani is based out of beautiful Colorado and has been covering mobile technology news and reviewing the latest gadgets for the last six years. His work can also be found on sister site CNET in the How To section, as well as across several more online publications.
Jason Cipriani
2 min read

Over the weekend, a Facebook chat feature was revealed--one that allows you to use a profile picture to represent someone instead of simply typing their name.

To place a picture into your chat, all you need to know is the Facebook user ID for either the friend or the page you want to use. You can find either one by visiting the user's profile and looking at the URL.

The user ID can be a string of characters, as shown above. Using the URL above, you would only need to know "cnet." Screenshot by Jason Cipriani
User ID's can also be a string of numbers. Using the URL above, you would need to know all numbers following "id=." Screenshot by Jason Cipriani

Once you have the user ID, to place the profile picture of that user into a chat, surround the user ID with double brackets. So, as an example, to place the CNET profile picture in a chat, you would enter [[cnet]]. Once you send the message, Facebook will automatically place the profile picture into the chat, instead of the text.

Here's an example of what it looks like:

Screenshot by Jason Cipriani

Going one step further, a generator was made, which allows you to type in what you want to say and get the corresponding picture codes for each letter. Simply copy and paste the code into your chat to see the fruits of your labor. See below for an example.

Click to enlarge. Screenshot by Jason Cipriani

A list of troll faces can be found on the Reddit page linked to at the bottom of the post. Yes, trolling via Facebook chat just got a whole lot easier. This trick will only work when using chatting on Facebook.com, it will not work on any of the mobile Facebook apps. 

While inserting a profile picture can be fun, and will probably be used a few times and then forgotten, the generator is sure to catch on with your 13-year-old cousin. So please, for the betterment of the Internet, try to limit the use of the generator to pranks and annoying your friends and not letting your cousin in on it. Please?

Source: Reddit

Via: Mashable