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I'm already using gravatar icons for the users of my web service. However, I'm finding several problems with this approach:

  • Only a small percentage of the users take the time to set up a gravatar profile. My users are not tech-savvy, but would be likely to add a dedicated photo to my site.
  • Users of my service are encouraged to use images that depict them in proper uniform for the industry my service relates to. They wouldn't want that same picture to be used for personal purposes throughout the internet.
  • They would not take the time or effort to manage a separate email address and gravatar account just to have an "in-uniform" profile photo for my service.

Before I implement my own profile image feature, I was wondering if there are any open-source solutions that I could leverage with similar features to gravatar. Specifically:

  • The ability to display any size thumbnail (up to 512px would be fine)
  • Takes care of caching different sized thumbnails
  • Has support for something like identicons, preferably pluggable with different style algorithms (monsters, etc.), even better if I can customize these
  • Ability to fall-back to gravatar if no photo found

Does anything like this exist? I haven't found it yet if it does.

Tauren
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    "any size thumbnail (up to 512px would be fine)"... you must have big thumbs! – Joachim Sauer Mar 16 '10 at 17:11
  • There's a closely related question on Meta : http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4553/non-gravatar-avatar , but it doesn't cover each's features. – rlb.usa Mar 16 '10 at 17:13
  • @Joachim: LOL -- well, I want to use it for not only thumbs, but large views as well. – Tauren Mar 17 '10 at 00:47
  • @rlb.usa: From what I see, that meta question doesn't really offer any open source alternatives to Gravatar. I'm looking for solutions that I can run on my own server. – Tauren Mar 17 '10 at 00:55

2 Answers2

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This is probably a year too late, but you might want to have a look at http://www.libravatar.org

François Marier
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  • Thanks so much, this is much closer to what I was hoping to find! I have implemented my own solution at this point, but it is far from perfect, so I'll definitely check out libravatar. – Tauren May 15 '11 at 19:21
  • hm, according to that page, it's "powered by ivatar", and looking at the [source for ivatar it's just calling gravatar](https://git.linux-kernel.at/oliver/ivatar/-/blob/master/ivatar/ivataraccount/gravatar.py#L15-22). .. or at least, that's what's going on in one file in there. perhaps there's a mode which does not call gravatar. – orion elenzil Oct 20 '21 at 16:59
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    @orionelenzil Depending on how clients are configured (MD5 hash v. SHA256), Libravatar may fall back to Gravatar if an image isn't available on Libravatar. See the details at https://wiki.libravatar.org/api/. – François Marier Oct 20 '21 at 20:34
  • makes sense, thanks. – orion elenzil Oct 21 '21 at 17:44
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Take a look at MonsterID from the creator of DokuWiki.

Franz
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  • @Franz: Nice, I saw that before, but didn't realize it would work standalone, thought it was just an add-on for gravatar. Thanks so much! – Tauren Mar 17 '10 at 00:46