Round Gravatar Profile Image – The Round, The Bad, and The Ugly
-
Today I find Gravatar profile pages containing round images cropped indiscriminately from the former square ones. The layout of the page is also less attractive than before.
No good. Bad move.
My Gravatar, Blavatar, and other uses of the same image are a trademark representing me and my blog. If I wanted it to be circular, I would have made it that way.
My carefully designed image looks ridiculous in the new arbitrary circular CORRUPTION. Maybe my art is no good, but it’s my chosen image, designed to fit all the rectangular places it is used and was used until now.
Should we expect Gravatar displays to switch to round in other places, e.g.: in Likes, comments, forum posts? Is this the Roundolution?
Aesthetically, regardless of what it does to my particular image, I think the round layout is goofy-looking overall, in anybody’s Gravatar profile, not just mine. It’s a lame approach.
How about an option to choose how we want to be represented to the world?
What was wrong with the old profile page format? I see nothing right about the new one.
Call me square.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
-
http://en.gravatar.com/balsamean
We’re sorry, that profile has been deleted.
Perhaps you’d like to log in or sign up for an account? -
It’s not deleted. I put it into Hidden status.
On further exploration, I find that some Gravatar profiles have the circle-cropped images and some don’t, and I don’t see a pattern for how they are selected for the honor.
-
-
-
I’m referring to people who had square profile images the last time I saw them, and have round ones now. I doubt they all suddenly decided to go round.
In any case, aside from them, I … me, the person speaking here on behalf of himself … did not upload a circular image to my profile. Mine has always been square. I didn’t change it to a circle, but there it is.
And it’s only the Gravatar Profile displaying it round. The image itself as it appears in Users/My Profile in Dashboard is the same square image that I put there long ago. So it’s not the image file that has changed. it is the way that the Gravatar Profile is displaying it.
It is only very recently that it got changed to a circle without any action on my part. The change corresponds to a change in the overall layout of the profile, too, with the description on the top left instead of below the picture.
I might not have noticed it for a long time if I hadn’t clicked “view full profile” on a comment notification and found the profile of someone I’d seen before suddenly have a circular image, and I thought it odd she would have done that, given the nature of her profile picture. So I checked my own, and found my square image clumsily cropped round, too.
Just now I went back and looked at mine again (I have to unhide it even to look at the profile myself), and it’s still the circle that I can’t believe I’m seeing. I put it back into hidden status.
Maybe I’ll experiment with deleting the Gravatar image from the profile and re-uploading it. Maybe I’ll create a new account and see what happens when I create it’s profile. Maybe I don’t want to troubleshoot this for WP instead of having them look into it and fix it.
-
The following people all showed up very recently in notifications I got for Likes, Comments or Follows. In each case, their profile image as shown in the notifications and elsewhere are all square … as were their pictures in their Gravatar Profile displays when I first looked at them (so recently that I can remember what they looked like). Today, they all have circular pictures in their Gravatar Profile displays, despite their Gravatar icons showing up square as before. Did they all suddenly decide to go round? This small group of people who all just within the past few days visited me?
http://en.gravatar.com/keg2
http://en.gravatar.com/hikingresearch
http://en.gravatar.com/jcpolicicchio
http://en.gravatar.com/rnwdgaf
http://en.gravatar.com/kristinacoleman
http://en.gravatar.com/gegallasRaincoaster: yes, you did. And that’s why it appears round here, as you meant it to appear. I did not upload a round image, but my Gravatar Profile suddenly displays it round, as with the other examples above, yet our Gravatar ICONS are still square.
So, again, it is the Gravatar PROFILE DISPLAY where the problem lies.
-
-
Raincoaster: yes.
I unhid it so you can see what I’m talking about:
http://en.gravatar.com/balsamean -
raincoaster Oct 2, 2013, 12:07 AM
So you’re saying that ONLY on Gravatar.com itself do the avatars display as round?Yes.
See screen clips in this PDF:
http://thebalsamean.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/gravatar-profile-circle.pdf -
-
By the way …in “Manage Gravatars” at gravatar.com, the image is square:
http://thebalsamean.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/manage-gravatars.png
… but when viewing the gravatar profile, it is round. -
My gravatar image has been deleted and re-uploaded with a slightly different one, still a square. Just waiting now for it to populate and appear in the profile.
-
-
I received a message from Elizabeth at WordPress Support saying, “All Gravatar profiles display the Gravatar in a circular frame now.”
-
HOWEVER, I just learned that the circular display occurs only when you have only one Gravatar image file uploaded, and no additional pictures in the Gravatar photo gallery.
I added a picture to the gallery, and the Gravatar profile display went square. I deleted the extra picture, and the profile display returned to round.
So, at least for now, if you want your Gravatar Profile image display to remain square as before, just add another picture to the profile photo gallery.
Oddly, when you do that, the profile gallery thumbnails will show a duplicate of your Gravatar image along with the extra picture you uploaded. When you delete the extra picture, the round version of the display will not include this thumbnail copy of your Gravatar.
- The topic ‘Round Gravatar Profile Image – The Round, The Bad, and The Ugly’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 
