Originally published on Wpshout.com on By David Hayes
I was recently working on setting up a site for a personal project and was surprised to discover that there was no place in the theme to add a custom picture for my user bio. I figured out what I wanted: to set my WordPress avatar without Gravatar. I’d rather not rely on a service like that if I don’t have to. But this wasn’t the WordPress avatar appearance I wanted:
I hunted through my user settings page for a while thinking I had to be missing what felt like such a basic feature, but nope! It’s not there, unless you use a service called Gravatar from WordPress.com.
A few Google searches later, I learned that this was one of those times that I needed to install a plugin to make it work. After a quickly trying a few plugins (that reduced the quality of my photo enough to cause some significant blurring), I settled on “Simple Local Avatars” as my WordPress plugin.
Using Our No-Gravatar WordPress Avatar Plugin, in Video
Check out David’s brief explanation of WordPress avatars, and why we use a plugin for it on WPShout:
Step-by-Step WordPress Profile Picture Without Gravatar
- From the WordPress Dashboard Menu, select “Plugins > Add New”
- Search for “Simple Local Avatars” (in the right had search field).
- Click “Install” and “Activate” on the plugin “Simple Local Avatars.” Once activated, your WordPress comment avatar plugin is basically good to go.
- To change your personal avatar on that site, you’ll need to edit your profile in WordPress. Select “Users” (from left dashboard menu again).
- Click “Your Profile.”
- Scroll down until you see a section labelled “Avatar”.
- Under the “Avatar” section, you’ll see an “Upload Avatar heading.” In they’re you’ll use the normal WordPress image selection and uploading tools.
- To make sure your changes take, you’ll want to click “Update Profile” for you profile image (without Gravatar” to start working.
Go get yourself a cookie because you did it! We using the Simple Local Avatar plugins here on WPShout. It’s great for us, for a ton of small reasons. We find it to be a great WordPress avatar without Gravatar solution. Cheers!