In case you missed it, new features were added to your Twitter profile about a month ago. One of the most prominent new features is the new header image, which is Twitter’s own take on Facebook’s Timeline cover. With the new header image, you can choose any picture over which your avatar, username and bio will appear, creating a new and fresh look for your profile.

These header images are not a must, at least for now – if you want your profile to look like it always have, you don’t have to touch it. There are, however, some fun and useful things you can do with this new header image, and it does make profile pages look snazzier. As expected, a new feature also brings a new problem: where can you find nice, high-quality and free images to use for your header?

There are many options out there, and today I want to introduce you to an especially useful one - TwitrCovers.

What Are Twitter Covers? What Is TwitrCovers?

First of all, if you haven’t seen the new Twitter covers/headers around, they look like this:

cover image twitter

As you can see, when done right, the header image is supposed to blend with your bio text, and enhance the overall feel of your Twitter profile.

TwitrCovers is one of many websites that offer free header images, but it stands out of the crowd for some very nice features, and one somewhat annoying feature. Luckily, the annoying feature can be easily avoided, which leaves a great website with some high-quality images for you to use.

Finding Your New Header Image

The TwitrCovers homepage includes all the newest additions to the collection. You can also browse the most popular covers, or if you want to stand out from the crowd, browse the entire collection by category.

twitter cover photo

Above I mentioned some very cool features that make TwitrCover stand out, now we get to the best one. When you just look at these images, it’s hard to imagine what they’ll look like on your Twitter profile. They might be beautiful, but will they work with text on them? It’s easy to find out: hover over any image you like to see a demo of what it will look like as a Twitter header image.

twitter cover photo

Isn’t that neat? So after browsing and finding an image you like, it’s time to transfer it to your Twitter profile page. There are two ways to do this: the short, annoying way, and the long, safe way. I’ll show you both, but I do recommend going with the second one, if you can.

The Short, Annoying Way To Change Your Header

So you’ve found an image you like and you want to see it on your profile. What now? TwitrCovers provides a very easy to way to change your header image, without having to even touch your profile settings. Click the image you like, and scroll down to find this button:

twitter cover photo

Yes, if you want to use this method you will have to follow TwitrCovers on Twitter, and it also asks for some other permissions when connecting to your Twitter profile, such as following new people (I guess it needs that to follow itself), updating your profile (I guess it needs that to change the image) and posting tweets for you (why does it need that?).

twitter cover image

If you choose to do this, nothing horribly bad will happen. You will be redirected back to TwitrCovers, and your header image on Twitter will really and truly be changed. As expected, you will also find that you are now following TwitrCovers. In spite of my worst expectations, TwitrCovers doesn’t actually post any tweet for you when you do this, so it’s not spammy, but I still feel uncomfortable with the permissions it asked for.

If you’re lazy, you can use this method, but you should probably revoke the app’s access from Settings –> Apps when you’re done.

The Long, Safer Way To Change Your Header

So you can let TwitrCovers do the hard work for, but use this option is not mandatory, which I appreciate. If you want, you can get the image you like, and change your header manually, without granting anyone any permissions to anything. To do this, find an image you like, and instead of clicking the big, blue, shiny button, click the smaller “Download Image Manually” link on the right bottom corner.

twitter cover image

This will open the image in full size, and you’ll be able to right click it and choose “Save Image As”. Remember where you saved the image – you’ll need it in a second. Now head over to your Twitter profile and choose Edit Profile from the menu.

twitter cover image

Choose “Design” from the left-side menu, and scroll down to find the “Change Header” button. When you click it, you’ll be able to choose the image you’ve just saved and set it as your header. Using this method, you can also choose how zoomed in you want the image to be, so it doesn’t have to look exactly as it did on TwitrCovers.

twitrcovers-8

Yay! Your Profile Is Now Beautiful

No matter which method you chose to go with, your profile should now look something like this:

cover image twitter

Or maybe even slightly better, if you put some thought into it. Do you already have a header image for your Twitter profile, or are you still looking for inspiration? Know of some other great sources for quality free images we should know about? Tell us all in the comments.