How to generate the random default "gravatars" like on Stack Overflow?

Question

How does Stack Overflow auto-generate the gravatars for those users who do not upload a picture or who have not created a Gravatar icon?

Where do these random avatars come from, and how can I generate them for my own site?

Sanfordsanfourd

Note: The question this was originally closed as a duplicate of has been migrated to Meta Stack Exchange, but IMO this remains a valid question for Stack Overflow, too. I have thus cleaned it up and voted to reopen it. – Bolte

Answer 1

The 'random' colorful gravatars are displayed because this query string parameter is being added to every gravatar source URL: d=identicon

This is done so that if the user doesn't have a gravatar image associated with his email, this 'random' image is displayed, instead of the default blue gravatar image.

The following displays the 'default' blue image because the parameter is not included:

Yet, the same URL with the d=identicon parameter included, shows this:

This is the URL used for the example: https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/94d093eda664addd6e450d7e9881bcad?s=32&d=identicon&r=PG

By the way these images (called Identicons) are not really random, but are generated based on the email hash.

See How is the default user avatar generated? for some Language Implementations of this algorithm.

Homegrown

Hi, is there an example of an implementation I could swipe for Ruby on Rails? – Sanfordsanfourd

Check out these links: douglasfshearer.com/blog/gravatar-for-ruby-and-ruby-on-rails | slightlycoded.com/blog/… – Homegrown

* "a geometric pattern based on an email hash", not the IP Address hash (source: fr.gravatar.com/site/implement/images ) – Joachima