User avatars locally?

Hello @piramidon, thanks for the feedback!

You have a couple options available to you:

1. Set your own locally hosted avatar for all reviews using the Shortcode:
   [reviews_rating avatar="/url/to/avatar.svg"]
2. Or you can remove avatars all-together using:
   [reviews_rating avatar=null]

You can see examples of this on the Demonstration Website.

There are a couple things that I am considering in a future release, like you mentioned, I do want to have a neat way to host the variety of avatars and the business’s default logo on the same website rather than using Google’s image CDN. However, I don’t want to clutter the Media Library with these images – with 1,000 avatars it would crowd out any relevant images. If you have any technical suggestions here, that would be welcome, otherwise, I am sure I’ll something online that covers this scenario.

Another feature which I’ve used in the multiple location version is allowing for avatars to be set individually using new or existing images set in the Media Library.

Thanks for the quick reply! Yes, I found the avatar parameter, although not straight away ??

I assumed the images would just be stored in the plugin directory, by something like this method, but the other review plugin actually stores them in wp-content/uploads.

I’m afraid I’m not much help beyond that, I’m not really a programmer… Happy to do some testing if necessary, though!

@piramidon Thanks for your suggestion, it is roughly what I was considering – setting a sub directory within uploads.

I will introduce locally-hosted avatars (and the business icons) in a future version of the plugin.

@piramidon I have added this functionality to version 5.2. Please download this new version so you can apply locally hosted images, specifically the avatars.

You’re quite unbelievable! If there’s a way to tip you, I’ll be happy to do that ??

I’ve tried this out now, and 20 of my 117 reviews have class="author-avatar local" and actually locally hosted images; the others just have class="author-avatar" and still get the images from Google (see source code on this page). Any idea on what’s happening?

• This reply was modified 11 months ago by Piramidon. Reason: typo

@piramidon Well observed!

This is entirely intentional: there is a synchronisation process that will populate your catalogue of reviews. Each batch is for 10 images, taking place every 30 minutes, or whatever the CRON task is set as. Once all reviews have been checked over, you should see all avatars set to “local”.

If you want to “tip”, I do have a donation link within the plugin’s About section and reviews are always very welcome. There’s no pressure to do either. ??

That makes sense, thank you!

The only tiny suggestion I’d make, for accessibility’s sake, is to change the alt text from “Avatar” to “[Author-Name] Avatar” (for both local and CDN images), but that’s a really unimportant afterthought…

@piramidon Thank you for the alt text suggestion, I’ll consider this change.

I’ve tried to keep the alternative text to a minimum here because the name is usually placed alongside the image. With screen readers, having the name read out twice in succession may not be that helpful – however, I’ll revisit this point.

Thanks so much for the ★★★★★ review and the generous donation!