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1

I was inspired by this animated avatar from free-avatars.com:

Please, no...

Is it possible to use an animated GIF as an avatar on gravatar.com? I couldn't get it to work, but maybe someone else knows a hack.

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4  
You should change your question to "How can I make an animated avatar to be used in gravatar?" or "Does gravatar service support animated images?". – GmonC Nov 12 '09 at 5:19
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And really, who wouldn't be inspired by that link?!? – Chris Farmer Nov 12 '09 at 5:37
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I'm pretty sure I don't look forward to seeing animated avatars... – Snark Nov 12 '09 at 6:25
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As an aside, I actually would like to get rid of all avatars from any third-party site, meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/4553/non-gravatar-avatar/… But well, world peace is more important. – Arjan Nov 12 '09 at 9:02
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If this day would have to come, I would praise again Opera for giving me the choice to not animate images, per page. – Gnoupi Nov 12 '09 at 9:02
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migrated from superuser.com Nov 3 '10 at 14:55

2 Answers

up vote 23 down vote

AFAIK, this isn't possible.

Everytime I upload an image, gravatar's system forces me to "crop" it. I believe they just extract the first frame from an animated image.

Check this blog post, you can see in the comments where people are complaining about this issue and png transparency too.

EDIT: Since there's a bounty for this question, here is a another quote from their official blog answering to a user asking the same thing (emphasis is mine):

Thunderm00n Says: September 3, 2008 at 2:31 pm

Hey there! Nice work, but why don`t you accept moving gifs or why we have to resize our avartas (just use a type of width and height attribute, min-height/width should be 80px max-height/width should be 120px) but its a great work. Keep on!

...which is answered:

apokalyptik Says: September 3, 2008 at 6:35 pm

(...) @Thunderm00n — It was a conscious choice not to accept animated images. On the whole most people don’t like them, and it can seriously detract from the look and feel of a site. Since we (all) are guests on peoples web pages we do our best to play nice with the other kids while we are there.

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7  
s/AFAIK/I really hope/g and s/isn't/will never be/g ;-) – Arjan Nov 12 '09 at 8:45
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/concur Dear Gravatar, Please do not consider adding support for animated avatars. Yours sincerely All right-thinking people of the interweb – AdamV Nov 12 '09 at 14:27
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This is definitely a case of 'feature' versus 'perceived bug'. – MikeyB Nov 18 '09 at 2:20
up vote 9 down vote

This is really impossible. I yesturday I have asked their support, and they sad:

  Hello,

We do not allow animated gravatar images.

Cheers!
Demitrious Kelly
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2  
Good news, though "allowing" is not the same as "possible"... – Arjan Nov 19 '09 at 8:38
Thank goodness! – ceejayoz Mar 15 '10 at 16:48

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