After a lot of tinkering, fiddling, poking, and prodding we’ve revamped the image support in gravatar. Now if you upload a GIF or a PNG we will preserve any transparency that might be in the image and serve that image to you as a PNG.
Unfortunately this does not retroactively fix existing images with black instead of transparent backgrounds. You’ll want to re-upload your transparent images, assign the new image to your email addresses. After that, give it about 30 minutes and clear your cache. Everything should work and look just fine.
A note for all you webmasters out there: If you’re worried about what transparent PNG images look like for your IE visitors, I would recommend taking a look at this handy Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 page which offers an explanation, information on workarounds, and a drop-in javascript which will work for all the images on a page.
Until next time – happy blogging!
Gravatar Blog 
Comments
50 responses to “Image Transparency, You Want it? You Got it!”
Great work!
However, and I hate to be ‘that guy’, but there’s a slight issue with alphas still. Just look at my icon here and you’ll see that my drop shadow isn’t a bit wonky. The original PNG has a smoother fade, but Gravatar makes the shadow hard. Still, it’s welcomed progress!
Thanks guys! I’ll certainly check it out,
I’ve always meant to ask: Is there any way to make new images show up faster? They always seem to take 30 mins or so.
Yay! Now to go re-upload…
w00t!
Happy Transparencing!!!
all righty. good info
Sounds great! Thanks for the new feature. 🙂
Cool, thanks a bunch.
If you’re worried about what transparent PNG images look like for your IE visitors […]
I wouldn’t recommend doing any hacks to support an eight year old browser. It’s history and people who use the thing need to be punished.
Thanks heaps, dudes!
> I wouldn’t recommend doing any hacks to support an eight year old browser. It’s history and people who use the thing need to be punished.
Most people have no idea what a browser is, let alone that old ones don’t work very well. They don’t deserve punishment. A little work to give them a nicer experience is well worth it.
Yay! Thanks for this. 🙂
Yeah! Thanks guys !
Cool!
thanks for that, cool feature
السلام عليكم
أبدأ كلامي بشعر لإقبال
كالطير غايته التقاط الحب في ظل القصور
هو طائر لكنه لم يدر تحليق النسور
Here’s a WordPress plugin which implements an IE png fix:
http://wp-plugins.novacorps.com/iepngfix/
I’ve used it on one of my sites which needed a transparent png in the header, and it seemed to work just fine 🙂
yay! thanks guys.
[…] as happy. Finally, today I happily discovered that Gravatar had indeed come back from 1995 and had restored support for PNGs and transparency. Even better, when I attempted to log in, I could supply my WordPress.com password to prove I owned […]
[…] According to Chris Pirillo from Gravatar Blog He said the following. After a lot of tinkering, fiddling, poking, and prodding we’ve revamped the image support in gravatar. Now if you upload a GIF or a PNG we will preserve any transparency that might be in the image and serve that image to you as a PNG. […]
🙂
Nice to see Gravatar still innovating.
Bah at having to find a file from many years ago that worked fine before you went mad… if only you’d kept the originals!
Ok, it’s good !
Finally, never really understood why this was removed in the first place.. Thanks for listening to our concerns.
Guess it’s time I got a *real* gravatar together. Nice to see the support for transparency.
[…] Image Transparency, You Want it? You Got it! […]
Yay! Glad to see my transparent avatars will work now. Thanks!
Nice thing 🙂
How long before OpenID support?
nice one there…looking forward to using it 😉
Great job with identicons, wavatars and monsterids and now transparency. You guys are making some awesome progress! By the way, we’re adding Gravatar support to the blog module in DotNetNuke which should be out within a month, so you’ll be getting some DNN love soon.
Regardez : transparent… comme avant !…
Afin d’être totalement transparent (et pas que dans les PNG), ce texte comporte du Microsoft-bashing rétrograde (concernant leurs produits avant 2006). Faut reconnaitre qu’ils ont fait des efforts, et qu’il est temps de moderniser les… visiteurs…
Excellent work!
Thank for your hard work, Gravatar in introducing people to new ideas and transparency.
Nice!
Ninguein fala portugues aki naum eah’
Not too shabby. 🙂
I will check this out.. Great work.
Is supporting png and transparent images really that innovative? I don’t know, it seems like this should have been a given.
Nice addition, good to know things are still improving greatly :D.
Thank you.
Very nice, tnx
hey, ur avatar fits the title, u see?!
Thanks guys! For now I will just stick with my jpeg because I am not so keen on the IE6 transparency fix scripts.
Oh, wouldn’t you just love it if Microsoft had put a time bomb in all IE6 installs? Just one click and boom! All IE6 browsers in the whole world forcedly upgraded to IE7 🙂
Yes, I know it is a compulsory update for home users, but there are so many retarded company IT departments where they simply block all browser upgrades…
That’s great new, I know many of the images I use online aren’t jpeg.
Wow!! It’s getting better and better. Keep it up man.,
if it is possible I want a translation in italian language.
[…] Actualización 7/6/08: Gravatar vuelve a soportar las imágenes con fondo transparente. […]
I can’t seem to be able to upload PNG and retain transparency. When I get to crop & finish i still get black background. Is there anything special that needs to be done to get transparent PNG working?