Picture

The picture takes effect as soon as it is saved, with no separate save button. It is not part of Save details: the other fields in Your details are saved separately. A new picture replaces the previous one, and an account has one picture.

Changing the picture does not ask you to confirm it is you with a second step. Once it is saved, the same picture is shown beside your name in the account menu at the foot of the navigation.

Your browser shrinks the image before it is sent. It scales the picture down so its long side is at most 512 pixels and re-encodes it as a JPEG, lowering the quality or the size further if it is still large. A transparent area is filled with white. The file you chose is not uploaded as it is, and the original stays on your device.

The browser keeps going until the result is 128 KiB or smaller: it tries lower quality first, then a smaller size, a few times over. If it cannot get under the limit it stops with That image is still too large after shrinking it. Choose a smaller one.

The server then checks the file again, whatever the browser did. It decides the type from the content of the file, not from its name or the type your browser reported, and accepts only PNG, JPEG or WebP. It refuses an empty file and one larger than 128 KiB. Uploads are also rate limited for each account.

Select Remove picture. The page confirms with Picture removed. and goes back to showing your initials. The button only appears when you have a picture.

An application that you sign in to and that asks for the profile scope can receive the address of your picture as the picture claim. The address includes a version, so a new picture gets a new address. Once you remove the picture, an application no longer receives an address for it. An application registered to see a different, per-application identifier for you (a pairwise identifier) never receives a picture address, because the address contains your real account identifier.

The picture itself is served from a public address on identity's own host, so that an application's page can show it without a session. That address needs both your account's identifier and the version, so the identifier alone does not fetch it. But anyone who has the full address can open the image without signing in, and a copy can be held in a browser or shared cache for up to an hour. Choose a picture you are comfortable with an application, and anyone it shows the address to, seeing. After you remove the picture, the address stops returning the image, apart from copies already held elsewhere.

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