Avatars

The Avatars application enables users to have an image associated with their account. This image is called an avatar and is displayed on the user’s public profile, next to their name in forums posts, blog comments etc. An avatar serves as a graphical representation of a user, and is used to personalize that user’s contributions on websites.

Users can choose an avatar from a gallery of predefined avatars (if this option is enabled) or create a custom avatar by uploading their own image from a file on their local disk. Unlike predefined avatars, custom avatars cannot be selected by other users and are deleted from the system if the user who uploaded them changes their avatar. All standard image formats are supported, including animations.

Kentico also offers the option of retrieving images from the Gravatar hosting service. See Using Gravatars to learn how to configure this functionality.

Community groups can also have avatars. These are displayed on the group’s profile and can benefit the group by providing a way for it to be better identified.

There are several ways for users or group administrators to add or change avatars. See Changing user avatars and Changing group avatars for more details. Administrators can manage all locally stored avatars as described in Managing avatars.

When displaying lists of users or groups on a website, you may often wish to display the matching avatar images alongside the items. This can be achieved by ensuring that the avatar is included in the transformation used to render the objects. See Displaying avatars in transformations for details and examples.