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I have chosen to crop my gravatar. It should—and does, in most places—appear like this:

terdon's normal avatar

As you can see, that's how it's shown under this very question. However, in the Users page (linking to U&L since I'm easy to find there, but the problem is network-wide), it is shown like this:

terdon's distorted avatar

The entire image is shown. I don't mind, particularly, given that I doubt many people would recognize me from that, but others might. And if they've chosen to only show a part of the image as their avatar, then that's what should be shown!

I'm not 100% sure about this since the images are quite small, but I think it is also shown distorted. Not the blur, that's part of the original, but the dimensions seem slightly off as though the image has been squashed to fit.

1Obviously, if you want something to be private you don't upload it and use it as your avatar, but still, if a user chose to crop, the crop should be applied everywhere.

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1
  • FYI. (tag edit won't cause any notification)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 17, 2017 at 6:32

2 Answers 2

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7

You have stumbled on a very old bug that was missed when we started rendering High DPI profile images. I have contacted Imgur and had them whitelist the 96 size. Hopefully it won't be long until that is implemented.

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3
  • Better late than never...
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 23:24
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    This issue has been resolved. We now serve the 96px size.
    – Geoff Dalgas
    Commented Oct 16, 2017 at 23:05
  • It's resolved on the users list page, but the bug is present on the user profile page scifi.stackexchange.com/users/98028/jenayah now, with a different image size.
    – b_jonas
    Commented Jan 21, 2019 at 20:13
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TL;DR: unless it's a remnant of this bug I don't think it's a bug, as imgur simply don't serve the size requested in Users page. You're not using Gravatar, at least not in your Stack Exchange accounts.

When editing your profile, you uploaded the image, by this making SE use imgur to host your avatar. As it stands, imgur does not support 96x96 size (which is used in the Users page) for the images it hosts (at least not in the dedicated Stack Exchange service) so it serves the full image instead.

If you want to use Gravatar you have to edit your profile, click "change picture" and choose Gravatar.

Also worth to note, I have no idea what you mean by "user chose to crop", never seen such thing, and surely it's not something imgur supports. The image you uploaded is not cropped in any way. It's showing as "cropped" in most places because imgur must resize it and "crop" it when generating the thumbnails for the set of sizes it does support. But you can't choose anywhere how it will be cropped.

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9
  • Huh. It was gravatar that had let me crop, or at least select which part to show. Apparently I switched at some point unless SE did it automatically for some reason. Either way, you're right, I wasn't using gravatar, thanks. Something is still weird, though. I tried uploading the imgur image to my profile ('upload new image'), and the image appeared squashed as above. I opened the my profile in a new link and it was fine. Still squashed in the users page though. So, the same image is squashed on one page but shown only in part ("cropped") in another. Probably worth its own report though.
    – terdon
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 20:03
  • @terdon it is "squashed" where imgur gives the original, then the browser force a hard resize. In other places like user profile or user card it shows a proper thumbnail. As for forced move to imgur it never happened, I still see many with Gravatar and surely not all of them switched back and forth.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 20:30
  • Yeah, I was clutching at straws there, hoping my memory isn't as bad as it is ;). So you're saying the browser does this? Then why would it be different only in one place? Still sounds like the image is being rendered differently on different pages which does suggest it is a bug.
    – terdon
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 20:33
  • @terdon yeah, it's confusing at first. Let's start with the fact each page use different size of the avatar. e.g. in the profile it's very big, in the users page big, in user card (under post) small etc. There are fixed widths for those, e.g. 96x96 pixels in users page. Any image, no matter what size, will be resized by the browser itself to fit 96x96 exactly, as it's part of the HTML/CSS of the page. However, since original avatars can be large files (e.g. 2 mb), SE tries to use the pre-set thumbnails of the avatars. Usually they exist, returning images in the desired size, but for 96x96 not.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 21:07
  • @terdon [cont.] hence instead of 96x96 image, which won't be resized by the browser as it was already resized (and cropped) by imgur, the browser gets original image, e.g. 1000x800 pixels, and resize it itself to 96x96. All that said, this might be a bug, i.e. imgur might have supported this size until a recent "upgrade" they did. (See here.)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 21:08
  • Hmm perhaps. At least one of the places the image was shown was using the s at the end. And thanks for the comprehensive explanation! And, in case you noticed, I had your avatar for a bit there. Sorry, I had used your avatar to test something and forgot to change back!
    – terdon
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 21:25
  • @terdon lol you mean avatar, Gravatar is just a name of one company/website, not the term. It's like calling all smartphones iPhones. No problem, I know it's not trivial knowledge, and now hope it's actually a bug and will be fixed, left a comment to Geoff on the other bug report. :)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 21:29
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    No idea what you're talking about. . . whistles innocently. Yeah, I know, but since most people user gravatar here, it slips out. :)
    – terdon
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 21:30
  • @terdon I think by now it's at least 70-30 for imgur. Gravatar has long periods of instability, for long months Gravatar images were simply broken for many people, depends on their location. (e.g. Israel, Europe, while users from USA still saw them.)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Oct 12, 2017 at 21:42

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