Profile Thumb in Profile Cover Block

You can actually deactivate the site avatars.  I was going to replace them on a site but never did.  Most members uploaded either a photo or some image they found on the net.

This can be done using the profile customiser module; at least for a members profile page.  Out of the box it is way too basic but I wrote a tutorial over at Boonex on how to add more areas; also in the background scrolling thing.  You do have to do a bit of code editing.  The tutorial is in my notes section on Boonex.  I should copy those off.  I think at some point Boonex might shut boonex.com down.  They deleted trac which removed all of the stuff archived there.  I would hate to see the Boonex forum disappear as I often go there looking for stuff.

It is done using CSS radius, making the square box have large enough radius that they become round.  I have never liked the round ones.  To remove the round thumbs you just need to edit the CSS and remove the radius setting.  If you use inspect feature of your browser you can see exactly what CSS sheet and the IDs and Classes that are controlling things.  You do have to turn off CSS compression in the admin.

I've never used the module because I didn't want my members using those silly avatars. Thus I wasn't aware of the photo manipulation offering. 

I've been using square profile pics since day one. It's a pretty easy thing to change and I wrote a tutorial many years ago. Maybe in a future version of Cheetah, there could be a button to select square or round photos. That could be made so that Admins can decide, or leave the choice to individual members.

If the person does not upload an image, then it uses the letter of the person on a grey background.  This idea sounds better; more attractive.   Maybe use a random image as the background and have the member's letter on top.  The other thing I did was to remove the round images; a square image is better; like a normal photo.  I think Boonex copied worthless FaceBook on the round image thing.  I remember a long discussion about it on Boonex but of course Andrew was rather stubborn when it came to things he thought was great.

The avatar module will allow you to upload a photo, a real honest to goodness photo, of yourself and allows to crop it to a square image.  You can also slide the box around to position it in the photo in case you are using a full length photo.  The avatar module works great for the member thumb.  You have to modify code to get it to work since by default it is using the photo module.  What I did on the site I am developing; it is a Dolphin based site as the owner did not want to buy another license to use Cheetah even though I tried to convince the person, is to remove the code to add to profile photo, change the URL for change thumbnail to point to the avatar module, and rewrote the code to use the avatar image, and then disabled site avatars (that is already in the code).

I think Avatars are useless. If people can't be bothered putting up a photo of themselves, the cat, or something sensible, why let them revert to a useless cartoon especially when half the membership may decide to select the same cartoon. May I suggest something like the Random Cover be used instead. If there's no personal avatar or profile photo, let the script randomly choose from twenty or more lovely photos or graphics. Depending on the site, admins could make these photos or graphics site related. 

I added a option in the avatar module instead to enable or disable that checkbox. It will be off by default.

I also defaulted the use site avatars to off as well. I will replace the avatars at some point in the future with some others.

Let's remove the "Copy to profile photos album" from the avatar module; I still think the avatar module is the best for thumbnails; I usually create several and then can switch them in and out depending on seasons etc; like for Halloween I have a flying witch I use. 

I would also remove the default avatars, they are outdated and most don't use them.  Or, find some open source new ones to replace them.

On a Dolphin site I am developing, I switched the profile thumbnail in the cover block to use avatars, changed the link to change thumbnail from the photo module to avatar module and removed the copy to profile photos checkbox.  It works very well.

I wrote about this some time ago, possibly on the Dolphin forum as well. To me the whole thing is messy and I created additional albums: Profile Photo and Album Photo. Somehow I managed to stop photos from these albums appearing in timelines simply because they don't belong there. Nor should the albums be public as Deano suggests.

These are changes I'll now struggle to migrate to Cheetah, thus my old Dolphin site with it's many changes is essentially defunct.

Deano did a lot of work with the albums which I'm grateful for, but I can only use some of those improvements. When Deano makes the changes, I'd like to see the following albums automatically created:
Member's Photos - General Photos Top of stack
Member's Profile Thumbs  - Not public and not in timelines
Members Cover Photos - Ditto
Friends Only 
Private Photos - Not sure if I want members storing their private porn on my server.
Create New Album 

The way Deano has made the first photo in the members album appear as the profile thumb is fine with me, but I don't want profile thumbs appearing in the timelines. I honestly don't believe that a member changing their profile thumb is "newsworthy!" Let's leave that nonsense to FB.

I will be interested to see what you come up with.  I like using the avatar module at the moment (removing the copy to profile photos of course; that should never have been a part of the avatar module).

I plan on switching an old Dolphin site to Cheetah; which reminds me, I was suppose to supply you with a copy of a site with content for the default modules to help with a migration script.

I already have plans for separating out the cover images into their own area. I don't believe there should be a publicly available album for those. They are not standard size images.

As for thumbnails, i planned on something different for that as well which is to allow any photo from any album to be selected and cropped for a thumb nail. My goal is to make setting a thumbnail image as easy as possible.

Sounds like a master plan!

There is one issue I see in the profile cover block regarding the thumbnail image.  It pulls the thumbnail for the cover block from the profile photos even if avatar is set in the backend.  It would be nice if the cover block thumbnail would use the avatar setting from the backend.  Also, the link to change thumbnail should then switch to the avatar module instead of the profile album.  This may not be what everyone would want so there may be a need to have an additional setting in the backend "Use Avatar for Profile Cover Thumbnail."  I personally don't like the way the cover block uses the profile album.  I think the avatar module is much better for handling not only the thumbs for such areas as listing members but also the cover thumbnail and I have had some clients that requested this.  I have recoded Dolphin to use the avatar module for the cover thumb and relinked the "change thumbnail" button to the avatar module.  So much better in my opinion to separate out the thumbnail from profile images. 

This is just mentioned for future consideration and for us to discuss if this should be a part of the code base or not.