---
title: Avatars
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/k9/managing-users.md
  - https://docs.kentico.com/k9/community-features/groups.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

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

![Selecting an avatar](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/k9/avatars/select_avatar.png "Selecting an avatar")

Kentico also offers the option of retrieving images from the **Gravatar** hosting service. See [Using Gravatars](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/community-features/avatars/using-gravatars.md).

[Community groups](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/community-features/groups.md) 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](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/community-features/avatars/changing-user-avatars.md) and [Changing group avatars](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/community-features/avatars/changing-group-avatars.md) for more details. Administrators can manage all locally stored avatars as described in [Managing avatars](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/community-features/avatars/managing-avatars.md).

When displaying lists of users or groups on a website, you can display the matching avatar images alongside the items. To achieve this, ensure that the avatar is included in the transformation used to render the objects. See [Displaying avatars in transformations](https://docs.kentico.com/k9/community-features/avatars/displaying-avatars-in-transformations.md) for details and examples.