Avatars are a big part of anyone’s online identity. Discourse already supports 3 options when it comes to avatars: based on the first letter of your username, your Gravatar or any images you want to upload.
But what if you want to provide your users with a limited set of avatars to choose from? It’s now possible thanks to the “selectable avatars” feature!
As an admin, if you click Edit next to the selectable avatars site setting, a modal will pop up and ask you to start uploading avatars.
You can either drag & drop up to 10 images at a time or click Upload Picture to browse your computer to select the images you want to upload.
Since it’s called “selectable avatars”, my expectation would be that they’re selectable but not enforced… Would it be a big change to make these avatars selectable without changing anything else?
Oh, and the logical next step would obviously be to make it possible to include avatar-sets in themes… Or is this already possible?
I know that my home site would really get some usage out of this provided it isn’t enforced that you must have one of these avatars, and that it was just another option alongside the letter/gravatar/custom image. Is that how this works, and if not, could it be an option?
We’re getting reports from users that they are able to use this tool to select avatars for other members, including site administrators…
I haven’t confirmed whether they are able to actually do it (none have been game enough to click the save changes button yet), but they can definitely see the “Change your profile picture” popup if they click on another user’s profile image.
I would love to use this feature too, but can’t delete profile pics for those who have already uploaded one.
Tight control is not the only valid use case. My site encourages photos but in the absence of photos, we would at least like to be able to visually differentiate users at a glance. The colored letters don’t do that very well; avatars from a list would do it much better.
Agreed with @markschmucker, such tight control of avatars is not the value I was looking for when I went searching for this feature.
Really, I want all of my users just to start out with one of the set avatars I have made instead of off-brand letters, but of course after that I want them to have the freedom to customize their profiles as they see fit.