views:

250

answers:

4

Some sites have the ability to grab your profile picture after you sign up for the first time without the user actually uploading a pic. I think stackoverflow has this functionality at sign as well....How does it work?

+6  A: 

It uses gravatar.com I believe. You associate an avatar with your email and then sites can use your email to locate your avatar. There is a plugin for Wordpress. Or google search 'gravatar API' to put it on your own site.

Good luck!

alex
+3  A: 

There is a site called http://gravatar.com that takes a MD5 hash of your email to load a profile picture

bendewey
+1  A: 

They're using OpenID. Some OpenID providers allow you to upload a profile picture or it wil associate it with your Gravatar's e-mail address (http://en.gravatar.com/).

Chad Moran
+5  A: 

stackoverflow uses gravatars which are linked by your email address. You can read more about how gravatar works on their developer resources page.

Jared