Image Transparency, You Want it? You Got it!

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!


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50 responses to “Image Transparency, You Want it? You Got it!”

  1. theseg Avatar
    theseg

    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!

  2. Δfoxtrot Avatar

    Thanks guys! I’ll certainly check it out,

  3. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    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.

  4. Kelson Avatar

    Yay! Now to go re-upload…

  5. yorgyb Avatar

    Happy Transparencing!!!

  6. me Avatar

    all righty. good info

  7. tptblog Avatar
    tptblog

    Sounds great! Thanks for the new feature. 🙂

  8. Thomas Clausen Avatar

    Cool, thanks a bunch.

  9. Chris Avatar
    Chris

    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.

  10. jdub Avatar

    Thanks heaps, dudes!

  11. Paul D. Waite Avatar

    > 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.

  12. Retodon8 Avatar

    Yay! Thanks for this. 🙂

  13. Clark Avatar

    Yeah! Thanks guys !

  14. hemasunder Avatar

    thanks for that, cool feature

  15. الجمر تحت الرماد Avatar
    الجمر تحت الرماد

    السلام عليكم
    أبدأ كلامي بشعر لإقبال
    كالطير غايته التقاط الحب في ظل القصور
    هو طائر لكنه لم يدر تحليق النسور

  16. Dougal Avatar

    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 🙂

  17. Fahmi Adam Avatar

    yay! thanks guys.

  18. […] 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 […]

  19. […] 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. […]

  20. Bruce Avatar
    Bruce

    🙂

  21. TheKhakinator Avatar

    Nice to see Gravatar still innovating.

  22. John Drinkwater Avatar
    John Drinkwater

    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!

  23. raoulman Avatar
    raoulman

    Ok, it’s good !

  24. yawner Avatar
    yawner

    Finally, never really understood why this was removed in the first place.. Thanks for listening to our concerns.

  25. brian Avatar

    Guess it’s time I got a *real* gravatar together. Nice to see the support for transparency.

  26. […] Image Transparency, You Want it? You Got it! […]

  27. David Avatar

    Yay! Glad to see my transparent avatars will work now. Thanks!

  28. racoon42 Avatar
    racoon42

    Nice thing 🙂

  29. Michael Wheeler Avatar

    How long before OpenID support?

  30. Jason Ho Avatar

    nice one there…looking forward to using it 😉

  31. Don Worthley Avatar

    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.

  32. 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…

  33. jurimi Avatar
    jurimi

    Excellent work!
    Thank for your hard work, Gravatar in introducing people to new ideas and transparency.

  34. oterosantos Avatar
    oterosantos

    Nice!

  35. Wesley Avatar
    Wesley

    Ninguein fala portugues aki naum eah’

  36. Mike Foley Avatar

    Not too shabby. 🙂

  37. Mike Avatar

    I will check this out.. Great work.

  38. Matt A. Avatar

    Is supporting png and transparent images really that innovative? I don’t know, it seems like this should have been a given.

  39. Psycho Dude Avatar

    Nice addition, good to know things are still improving greatly :D.

  40. maryan33 Avatar
    maryan33

    Thank you.

  41. Bert Avatar

    Very nice, tnx

  42. asghar Avatar
    asghar

    hey, ur avatar fits the title, u see?!

  43. fileinabox Avatar
    fileinabox

    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…

  44. Austin Loan Signing Agents Avatar

    That’s great new, I know many of the images I use online aren’t jpeg.

  45. Molly Avatar

    Wow!! It’s getting better and better. Keep it up man.,

  46. francobollo Avatar
    francobollo

    if it is possible I want a translation in italian language.

  47. […] Actualización 7/6/08: Gravatar vuelve a soportar las imágenes con fondo transparente. […]

  48. morozgrafix Avatar

    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?

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