Add an alternative to Gravatar.

[funkaoshi]

We should have pretty circular avatars ala Demiba or Path.

[hhaidar]

I've added gravatars.

[TriDni]

How can i use gravatar on my user ?

[hhaidar]

The email that you use for your LCB account needs to match whatever you signed up with on http://en.gravatar.com/

The gravatar URL is just an md5 of your email address.

[hhaidar]

@TriDni looks like you got it working!

[TriDni]

Great thanks :) I'm a noob of Gravatar :)

[tiye]

Bad news, gravatar is not available in mainland China.

[BoxingOctopus]

Yeah I've been thinking for a while that we should support another method for profile pics aside from Gravatar.

[hhaidar]

Re-opening this.

@jiyinyiyong do you know of any alternatives that we can fallback too?

[tiye]

@hhaidar I think encouraging users to upload images is my best solution(cropping is not neccessary though).

[hhaidar]

@jiyinyiyong do you think this is something you can work on? It might be a while before we get to it as our team has access to Gravatar.

[sibartlett]

Avatar upload functionality should use the upload plugin currently in use (local/S3).

[tiye]

@hhaidar I'm not quite familiar with server side programming and was not planning to do that :(

[sibartlett]

@jiyinyiyong no worries :)

[bnvk]

There is libravatar.org which is a more open Gravatar

You could also make a tool that allows ppl to input their Twitter @handle or Facebook username and then it goes and pulls in that avatar!

[pathetiq]

+1 for twitter photo or even a local directory where we can upload each user photo. each photo can be link to a user id. This way it can be possible to add a local/gravatar/other sections in the settings.yml.

[sibartlett]

We're planning to use Mongo's binary field support for avatar uploads - so we don't need to rely on a file system (local/S3/etc).

[hhaidar]

A little preview of what's to come:

[ghost]

Sweet! On Jun 22, 2015 1:47 PM, "Houssam Haidar" notifications@github.com wrote:

A little preview of what's to come: [image: screen shot 2015-06-22 at 4 43 59 pm] https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/1066160/8292560/528013ee-18fe-11e5-8f42-971fab45ea84.png

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat/issues/4#issuecomment-114257498.

[superlou]

Looks great. Is there a pull-request or branch available to try this feature?

[hhaidar]

@superlou ya I have a really barebones implementation in #521

You can add something like this to your settings.yml now:

avatars:
  providers: [gravatar, initials]

It'll try gravatar first and then go to an SVG generator. I recommend removing gravatar if you're not going to use it.

[legel]

Hey @hhaidar

I was just wondering what it would take to get this feature finished up. The screenshot looks really nice and in general the initials are a cleaner, smarter fallback than the same generic logo Gravatar assigns to everyone... which gives rise to a lot of visual debt in the application, as more and more users sign up with no connection to Gravatar. For those users (a majority of the world's population, plus all the various email permutations not connected with Gravatar even for those users who've tried it out), it would be great if there was at least some way to have a more personalized picture than this all over the platform. I like the initials as a default, and a baseline if nothing else, while being able to add a picture (no cropping) through the Edit Profile section also seems to make complete sense...

Thanks in any case for the excellent work, let me know if there's something specifically I can help with.

Lance

[craSH]

If using LDAP for user authentication, it could be nice to pull user photos from the directory as well.

Currently gravatar.com is used for profile photos. Consider first trying to use profile photos for the user from their LDAP entry. The available, standard fields are jpegPhoto (preferred, can be high-res/no specific size limit) and thumbnailPhoto (limited to a fairly small size).

• jpegPhoto: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc221100.aspx
• thumbnailPhoto: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc221395.aspx

It would be nice to be able to disable Gravatar in the case of using AD/LDAP auth as well.

Additionally, the login page will render a Gravatar for any email account with a Gravatar - including those not permitted to login to the system. There should be a check to prevent outside users' gravatars from loading at all, it may lead users to believe they have an account on the system when they do not.

[OliPelz]

Functionality of uploading local image files instead of relying on an external image service really is important for our department (governmental) because we need a chat application which is 100% self-hosted with zero connections to another external service. At the current state we cannot use it because this is a no-go for us! Please add this feature!