Gravatar not appearing in admin bar

Well the first and easiest question is do you have a gravatar account, and if you do, is that account linked to the same email address that you use in WordPress? If neither of the above two are true, then it won’t show up.

Are you using the same email address for WordPress and your gravatar account?

dkotter: Yes and yes. I’ve had a Gravatar account for some time and use in many other web-based services. It’s connected with the same email registered with my WordPress blog.

esmi: Yes

Okay that is interesting. As far as I know, there is no setting that allows you to choose to use your gravatar picture, it just does it by default. So the only thing I can think of is a plugin or your theme is interfering with it. So you can try the usual disabling plugins and switching to the default theme to see if that fixes the issue.

dkotter: Thanks for the info. One thing that’s interesting is that the theme I used to help my friend is the same one I’m using: WordPress’s own TwentyEleven. I grant it could be a plugin conflict. I’ll mess around with that a bit and see what I can come up with. Thanks again!

OK I finally found the problem. After pouring over reams of PHP code, deactivating all my plugins, comparing files between my WP install and my friend’s, the problem was just a simple setting. Under Discussion > Settings, there is an option to show/not show avatars. I had this set to not show. I thought this setting only affected commenters, but apparently it’s global. Once I turned it on, bingo. My gravatar appeared. ??

Thanks again to those who posted ideas!