Is Your Gravatar Retina-Ready?
July 30, 2012 | Posted by Erica
Now that all of Gravatar.com is optimized for retina display, you’ll be looking extra sharp to anyone who views your Gravatar profile or Hovercard from a device like the iPhone 4.
But are you looking your best? If you’re using a low-resolution image of yourself that you cropped from a friend’s Facebook photo two years ago, then it’s time for an update 🙂 Log in to Gravatar.com and upload a new image now, so that you can get a full-resolution version at all sizes, on all sites.
If you’re one of the many sites that uses Gravatars, you’ll also be happy to know that we’ve increased the maximum size image you can request, all the way up to 2048px! That means you can go ahead and implement higher resolution user images for all devices, high-dpi or otherwise.
We’d love to hear about any Retina-compatible implementations of Gravatar in the comments.
joint
Nice! .. Erica, you should update your own gravatar! hehe
Thanks for the tip, it probably is time to get a higher res on my gravatar pic . . . oh btw, that pretty smile on your Gravatar profile? Heavily pixilated. 🙂
Gravatar is still essentially “broken” for most sites. When accessing our Gravatar images, Gravatar sends us cached images of avatars we have used in the past, not our current ones. When that is fixed, we may re-enable Gravatar support on our sites and users can update their Gravatars as they see fit. But for now, why bother if the new Gravatar is not properly pushed out to the sites that use it?
Best example I can find is the XenForo forum system. Of the ones I frequent, I can have as many as three different Gravatars displaying across them, yet none of them are my current one. In fact, even on the same site, I will sometimes show one Gravatar next to a post, where my profile will show a completely different one…and BOTH will be outdated. We’ve already determined that XenForo uses perfectly valid URLs per the Gravatar API, and I am able to “force” the current Gravatar to display by inserting a random “dummy” value at the end of the URL.
Thread here: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/whats-up-with-gravatar.25170/
If I had more time I would list other sites that Gravatars do not work on. This is but one example.
If you can email in details to our support team via this form: http://en.gravatar.com/site/contact-us/ they can help you figure out what’s going on there; sounds like a bug with the cache invalidation across our network. Gravatars are normally permanently cached on a CDN to speed up delivery, but making any change to your image should clear those caches and update to the new image. You could also try changing your image and then changing it back.
I’d have thought 512×512 was already higher enough resolution already, lol.
Depends what you’re using Gravatars for Ryan. For most comment areas or things like that, definitely 512 covers most people. For things like the Gravatar Profile pages though, it’s nice to be able to get bigger images. Who knows what folks will do now that they can get bigger versions?
Sure but how high? Before you know it, comment sections under articles take minutes to load. People might disable the use of gravatars on their website
The actual implementation of these new image sizes is up to the individual site that’s displaying them. We’re not forcing higher-res images under the same requests.
[…] Gravatars, mshots, and images embedded from *.files.wordpress.com will show up […]
Wow, that’s quite a jump from the old 512px max. Very snazzy!
Exciting:)
Thanks for the update and uploading my High resolution right away.. 🙂
Here is great news. I adore the way in which Gravatar is actually learning acceptance. Complete someone contain one list of the entire companies who handle Gravatar? I may handle it toward influence fresh arrivals to sign pace.
[…] serve High Resolution images for users that can see the images on the sites the WordPress hosts. Gravatar will also get this upgrade, making all images HiDPI ready as […]
I will need to change it apparently.
[…] also completely revamped Gravatar to be Retina-ready, and made it so that all Gravatars across WordPress.com are HiDPI as […]