Profile image incorrectly marked as changed when editing other profile information

Question

I recently decided to remove some information from my profile so rather than make the same edit 42 times I decided to use the relatively new option of only copying the changes rather than copying everything. So I edited my Stack Overflow profile and then clicked the "Save and copy changes to all Stack Exchange communities" button.

I did this on Thursday 23rd October, and didn't notice anything untoward. I wasn't online on Friday, but when I logged in this morning (Saturday 25th) I discovered that all my profile pictures had been changed to by Stack Overflow one. Where I can check^* I can see that I have a "user switched profile image to imgur" entry at the time I made the change on Stack Overflow.

However, according to the information I can see on my Stack Overflow profile it also claims I changed my profile image on Thursday when I know I didn't. It seems that changing any other data on the profile also updates the image.

NOTE: When I copied the the other profile changes it only showed those changes I expected in the confirmation dialog.

* one of the perks of being a mod.

Answer 1

For Winter Bash 2014, one of the secret hats (Chameleon) was triggered by the "user switched profile image" log entry. While tracking down why people were getting the hat without having changed their avatars, we discovered:

1. For people who use Gravatars, any profile edit triggers the log entry. Since a Gravatar is determined by hashing the email address, Gravatar users should only be logged as changing avatars when they update their email.

2. When a user has an "Uploaded picture" as their avatar, creating a linked account on another Stack Exchange site inserts a spurious log entry.

Your report seems to be something else again. Something added ?s=128&g=1 to the end of the Imgur URL. Perhaps it has something to do with preparing for the new profile avatar size?