Alternative to Gravatar

The use of Gravatar to implement author images is not usable for my client.

I can totally understand this, why would my client want to have to spend the additional resources required to create a wordpress.com account (which can never be deleted) simply to add an author image?

Also the site is a multi author blog and my client, as the site administrator, wants the ability to add every author image.

The fact that the gravatar website requires a wordpress.com account makes this impossible as they require a unique email address for each account, and my client only has one. It is not an option to request that each author set up a gravatar account themselves, that is too much to ask of our authors.

My client does not require author images that are recognised across multiple sites either, the author images for my clients site are specific only to this single website.

As such, my client needs to be able to add author images via the ‘edit user’ screen of the WordPress dashboard.

How do I go about achieving this using a plugin such as Author Image?

I’ve already had a play around with this. I can see that I need to amend the twentysixteen_entry_meta function (I’m fine with using child themes & functions.php files) for the display of the author image in the single post left section, but I just can’t amend it sufficiently to get the image uploaded using the Author Image plugin to display.

The default usage in WordPress of Gravatar for author images is a major drawback of the system. I’ve had so much poor feedback on it from my clients. You really should build this functionality into the core, or at least provide an option to use either Gravatar or a locally hosted author image.