Avatar / Profile picture Support for Users/Organization

[grb]

@Shuckle

only by picking different colors, and that is it

FYI, You can also change the avatar initials, by changing the name associated with the account.

[rokejulianlockhart (Mr. Beedell, Roke Julian Lockhart)]

@Shuckle

I just meant to say that, the designer(s) who may assist in pushing this feature forward, can use the community’s UI as reference when implementing, helping with a huge part of the process. Coding is one thing, and designing is another.

@Shuckle, in this case, Discourse’s implementation - like Bitwarden’s - uses such standard components in such a predictable manner that the design is trivial. Storing personal user data in an inefficient (bitmap) form, at scale, isn’t necessarily. You have compression to contend with.

Though, in retrospect, they have already created a file upload mechanism for vault entries, and presumably these are encrypted.

@Shuckle

Especially considering you see your initials and your selected color in the browser extension. It felt strange as a user, when going through the settings, only to find you can customize the icon, but only by picking different colors, and that is it. I have personally never really seen this type of feature in a SaaS. Profile pictures is always the default.

Indeed. It seems mighty strange that they spent time creating the dialog without doing it properly, because even if there is more to do, they were working on it and used to poll and cache Gravatar.

@grb

As pointed out in Comment #9 of this thread, Bitwarden apps used to have Gravatar support until about a year ago. This functionality was deliberately removed in October 2023 to make possible implementation of the avatar color picker that is currently in use.

@grb, I’d have preferred that they retained that. I and many others are used to using Libravatar and Gravatar.

[grb]

@rokejulianlockhart

@grb, I’d have preferred that they retained that. I and many others are used to using Libravatar and Gravatar.

I am not privy to Bitwarden’s decision-making process, beyond any comments by Bitwarden staff that can be found on public discussion forums.

It seems that the avatar framework used to implement the color-picker is different from the avatar framework that was previously used to support Gravatars. Perhaps there is no suitable avatar framework available in NodeJS that can simultaneously support both.

Also, one benefit of the new avatar framework is that it is synced — once I set up an avatar color (and initials) in the Web Vault app, it syncs automatically to all other apps and browser extensions. With the old avatar framework, Gravatars were disabled by default and had to be enabled in the app or extension preferences — however, this preference was not synced across apps.

[rokejulianlockhart (Mr. Beedell, Roke Julian Lockhart)]

@grb

Also, one benefit of the new avatar framework is that it is synced — once I set up an avatar color (and initials) in the Web Vault app, it syncs automatically to all other apps and browser extensions. With the old avatar framework, Gravatars were disabled by default and had to be enabled in the app or extension preferences — however, this preference was not synced across apps.

@grb, irrespective, I would have preferred Gravatar, since that’s a more broad problem that they’ve yet to remediate. Such stopgap measures of solely synchronising certain preferences at seeming random is inadequate:

How to sync vault.bitwarden.com/#/settings/preferences?

Hi @rokejulianlockhart, Thanks for asking. Currently clients operate with client-specific settings. The team is looking at a ways to manage client settings in the future.

Enabling that Gravatar synchronisation preference alongside all the rest I must configure each time I authenticate for the first time in a browser profile wouldn’t be of any significant difficulty.