Profile picture being imported - from where?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

Kevin_McKinney is importing user data from an old Snitz forum and noticed that some users have profile pictures despite not importing them. He suspects the images might be pulled from external sources using email addresses. steko explains that the platform uses Gravatar to automatically fetch profile pictures based on email addresses, and suggests disabling the automatically download gravatars setting if desired. Kevin_McKinney thanks steko and plans to disable the feature.

1

I’m working on importing from an old forum (Snitz software). There wasn’t a script for that forum, and I’m not a Ruby developer, so I’m hacking something together based on what I can figure out from the other import scripts.

I finally had success in my sandbox environment yesterday, but I was confused why a few of the users had profile pictures when they imported. I have no idea where they’re pulling from… I’m not importing anything beyond username, name, email address, and inserted date from the user table. As I’m not a Ruby developer, I was lost trying to figure out where that might be happening, and figured I’d just ask. Is it somehow using the email address and checking with something on the internet for any profiles that use the same email address? One of the images seemed like the same profile picture that a guy uses on his LikedIn account. That’s what got me thinking maybe it looks for something online.

2

The email address is used to match Gravatar profiles, but you can change the setting automatically download gravatars if you like.

3

@steko Thanks for clarifying, and extra points for the setting tip. I’ll disable that and see how things go.