17

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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12
  • 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
    Commented Nov 12, 2009 at 5:19
  • 6
    And really, who wouldn't be inspired by that link?!?
    – Chris Farmer
    Commented Nov 12, 2009 at 5:37
  • 45
    I'm pretty sure I don't look forward to seeing animated avatars...
    – Snark
    Commented Nov 12, 2009 at 6:25
  • 2
    As an aside, I actually would like to get rid of all avatars from any third-party site, meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4553/non-gravatar-avatar/… But well, world peace is more important.
    – Arjan
    Commented Nov 12, 2009 at 9:02
  • 1
    If this day would have to come, I would praise again Opera for giving me the choice to not animate images, per page.
    – Gnoupi
    Commented Nov 12, 2009 at 9:02

2 Answers 2

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28

AFAIK, this isn't possible.

Every time 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 an 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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  • 8
    s/AFAIK/I really hope/g and s/isn't/will never be/g ;-)
    – Arjan
    Commented Nov 12, 2009 at 8:45
  • 20
    /concur Dear Gravatar, Please do not consider adding support for animated avatars. Yours sincerely All right-thinking people of the interweb
    – AdamV
    Commented Nov 12, 2009 at 14:27
  • 5
    This is definitely a case of 'feature' versus 'perceived bug'.
    – MikeyB
    Commented Nov 18, 2009 at 2:20
  • this makes me wonder, is there an alternative to gravatar? something that would accept gifs?
    – user151496
    Commented Dec 16, 2023 at 13:55
17

This is really impossible. Yesterday I asked their support, and they said:

Hello,

We do not allow animated gravatar images.

Cheers!
Demitrious Kelly

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1
  • 5
    Good news, though "allowing" is not the same as "possible"...
    – Arjan
    Commented Nov 19, 2009 at 8:38

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