A while back I saw a tweet from @jackfriks describing how surprisingly long it took to ship something as simple as an avatar upload feature (11 months!). It's not that it was difficult to do, but it was never a priority, even if that is what our users see and click on every day to get to their settings / billings etc.

It got me thinking: why are we still relying on Gravatar, random initials, empty defaults, or worse, whatever unpredictable photos users choose to upload themselves? Especially if you're an enterprise company, or a place where users interact with one another. None of these options guarantee safety, consistency, or professionalism - and obviously none are on brand. Or customized for holidays.

And because nobody built this, I did it myself. Check some examples, including with Jack himself, here: https://www.memoreco.com/explainers/branded-avatars.

Feel free to use the camera, I set a short retention policy and the images will be deleted. And you cannot send me dick picks because I baked in safety - NSFW, and ONE face detection.

This should be useful for the holidays, feel free to connect over Twitter if you want to add it in time to your sites, or about pages, or customer testimonials, etc.