Get your photo beside blog comments using Gravatar

I’ve seen photos displayed with the comments on many blogs. How does one get an image to appear? Are these people members of these blogs? Also, even though others have their photos, I get an image with blocks and triangles and sometimes even little cute looking monsters.
Portia Steele

The ideal way to have your photo displayed along with blog comments is to create a Gravatar. The free Globally Recognized Avatar service requires you to make a profile, upload a photo or an avatar and associated it with an email address. This gravatar image / photo is pulled from your profile and shown along with the comment you post on a blog. However, please note that the email address you submit when posting a comment should match the one in your profile on the Gravatar service.

Display your photo along with blog comments using Gravatar

Gravatar is a 100% free service. An account can be created in less than a minute – all you require is an email address and a photo / image / avatar. Here are some salient features of Gravatar service.

• Gravatar enables users to have a photo displayed along with comments on web sites and blogs.
• You can have multiple email address in addition to the primary address.
• Each email address is associated with an image / photo / avatar.
• A Gravatar image is shown only when the associated email address is submitted along with the blog comments.
• To get your photo with the comments, the Gravatar service has to be enabled on the blog or web site. This, as you can understand, is entirely up to the web site owner or administrator and beyond your control.
• The three ways to get your photo on Gravatar are:
  • direct upload from the computer,
  • a webcam capture, or
  • a web link to an image file already located on the internet.
• Images from Flickr Photostream (Yahoo photo album) or Facebook can quickly be made into Gravatars.
• Once a photo is supplied to Gravatar, you can crop it to remove unwanted parts.
• Gravatar images are 80×80 pixels in dimension.

Identicon and a monster image with a blog comment instead of your photo?

The image with blocks and triangles that you see along with blog comments is called an Identicon which is a visual representation of the I.P. address of your computer. Those monster images are found typically on blogs that run on the WordPress platform.

Conclusion: You don’t need to be a “member” of the blog to have a photo displayed along with your comments. The Gravatar service will work in most cases.