Bart Kuijper

When displaying a post or comment with avatars enabled, WordPress will always check for the existence of a Gravatar. (Note: even the default avatars ‘mystery person’ and ‘blank’ are in fact Gravatars served from gravatar.com.) WordPress does this by sending an MD5 hash of every displayed post or comment author’s email address to gravatar.com. Even with many plugins that introduce locally stored default or user avatars, this check still happens. On top of that, some themes or plugins force (Gr)avatars to load even if the display of avatars is disabled completely in WordPress’ settings. If for whatever reason you do not wish for Gravatar to receive these requests (which some people have voiced GDPR concerns about), this plugin is for you.
The way it works is every time WordPress attempts to display an avatar, this plugin first checks if the image is about to be retrieved from gravatar.com. If it is, the URL is changed to the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image (included with this plugin). If the avatar has any other source, this plugin doesn’t interfere.
Gravatars are also removed from the Discussion page in Settings and replaced with the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image. Again, any non-Gravatar images are left alone.
Upon activation of this plugin, if a Gravatar is selected as the default avatar, that setting is changed to the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image. If any non-Gravatar avatar is selected, that setting isn’t changed.
Upon deactivation of this plugin, if the locally stored ‘mystery person’ image is selected as the default avatar, that setting is changed to the Gravatar logo. If any non-Gravatar avatar is selected, that setting isn’t changed.

Redirect Gravatar requests

All requests to load an avatar from gravatar.com are redirected to a local image, preventing Gravatar from potentially gathering data about your site  …

10up

Jeffrey Paul

Oomph, Inc.

Jake Goldman

Darin Kotter

Faisal Alvi

Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles if the current user has media permissions. Generates requested sizes on demand just like Gravatar! Simple and lightweight.
Just edit a user profile, and scroll down to the new “Avatar” field. The plug-in will take care of cropping and sizing!
<ol>
<li>Stores avatars in the “uploads” folder where all of your other media is kept.</li>
<li>Has a simple, native interface.</li>
<li>Fully supports Gravatar and default avatars if no local avatar is set for the user – but also allows you turn off Gravatar.</li>
<li>Generates the requested avatar size on demand (and stores the new size for efficiency), so it looks great, just like Gravatar!</li>
<li>Lets you decide whether lower privilege users (subscribers, contributors) can upload their own avatar.</li>
<li>Enables rating of local avatars, just like Gravatar.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Support Level</h3>
Simple Local Avatars’ support level is marked as <code>stable</code>. 10up is not planning to develop any new features for this, but will still respond to bug reports and security concerns. We welcome PRs, but any that include new features should be small and easy to integrate and should not include breaking changes. We otherwise intend to keep this tested up to the most recent version of WordPress.

Simple Local Avatars

I've 100+ writers on a news website. It's was so hard for to everybody create an account in Gravatar. This plugin helps me a lot to upload writer photos from the dashboard.

Hats of the plugin author.

Great plugin

Great Plugin Great Support


The support of the WordPress REST API is a lifesaver for me. Simple Local Avatars is the only avatar plugin I know of that supports the REST API.I used it in my React with WordPress Tutorial. Without it, the whole Tutorial wouldn't have worked.


Does what it says and supports REST API


I like that it allows gravatar to continue to be used. If you set the local only option however all your existing avatars will be reset to the same avatar.  People get used to their own avatars and these shouldn't change, they should be copied locally from gravatar when the option is set if local copies don't already exist.  Croping also fails.  Looks like I need to look for another plugin as this is no longer under development.


Good but with "Features"


This plugin does well in extending WordPress' Avatar capabilities.


Nice Plugin

Adds an avatar upload field to user profiles. Generates requested sizes on demand just like Gravatar!

Redirect Gravatar requests vs Simple Local Avatars