Just to clarify, WordPress supports Gravatar so that users do not have to upload a profile image. Gravatar is “globally recognized avatar” – it’s tied to their email address and if they have a gravatar, WordPress will use that automatically. There’s no need for a plugin for this.
For an example of how this works, the image you see for me in this forum (which is a bbPress forum – so within the WordPress environment) is my Gravatar image. Whatever email address you have on your wordpress.org account does not have an established gravatar, so it just shows a random image (until you set up a Gravatar account for that email address).
Without knowing detail of your particular situation, I’d recommend sticking with Gravatar because it is a global process – so if users might be members on other WP sites, wordpress.com, wordpress.org, and many many other places, they have one consistent image they don’t have to worry about.
If you have a need to for specific user images, WP’s default to Gravatar can be overridden. Probably the simplest way to approach it is to use the WP User Avatar plugin. That plugin allows you to have users upload custom avatar images and uses those in place of Gravatar.
Hope that helps clarify.
I hate to ask a stupid question but how does a user associate an image with his email?
That’s not a stupid question at all. Anyone can go to https://en.gravatar.com/ and click “Create Your Own Gravatar” to sign up.
I went to the site and am a bit confused. It talks about needing a Gravatar Plugin. Do I need this or the fact that your software uses this…is this enough? I did not see anything on the site as to how an ordininary user gets a Gravatar…only info for developers. Am I missing something?
The developer information is only if you are integrating gravatar into your application – if it is not already integrated. WordPress already has gravatar integrated.
An ordinary user can go to https://en.gravatar.com/ and click the big blue button that says “Create Your Own Gravatar” to sign up. Then they can assign an image to their account that will be used globally on any site that integrates gravatar (which would be every WordPress site, wordpress.com, wordpress.org, and many others.
If the user already has a wordpress.com account, they can sign into gravatar.com with that.
I would suggest going through the process to fully understand it. It
