8 Avatars

jabber.el supports viewing and publishing avatars according to XEP-0153, vCard-Based Avatars. By default, if you have an avatar in your vCard (see Personal information), it will be published for others to see, and if other people publish their avatars, they will be displayed in the roster buffer and in the header line of chat buffers, if your Emacs can display images. Otherwise, jabber.el will not fetch avatars at all.

To disable retrieval of other people's avatars, set jabber-vcard-avatars-retrieve to nil. To disable publishing of your own avatar, set jabber-vcard-avatars-publish to nil. To disable avatars in chat buffer header lines, set jabber-chat-buffer-show-avatar to nil.

There are a number of restrictions on avatar images in the specification. Most of them are not enforced by jabber.el.

• The image should be smaller than 8 kilobytes; this is enforced by jabber.el.
• The image height and width should be between 32 and 96 pixels; the recommended size is 64 by 64 pixels.
• The image should be square.
• The image should be in either PNG, GIF, or JPEG format. (jabber.el will behave incorrectly if the image is not in a format supported by Emacs.)

Avatars are cached in the directory specified by jabber-avatar-cache-directory, by default ~/.jabber-avatars/. The cache is never cleaned, so you might want to do that yourself from time to time.