Ask IH: Avatar generation
I want to be able to generate interesting & non-controversial (gender-neutral as it saves me a form field) avatars for users for an app. Is there an API for that? How is IH creating its Avatars (mine actually looks a lot like me when I was younger)?
Take a look at this 👉 https://getavataaars.com 👨👩👧👦
I did see this one and it's great - but no API that I can see. Unless I indulge in some webscraping.
I'm thinking on building an API based on this, I can build it in a day. If you want I can tweet you when it's ready.
You know what, I'm building it now 😜 should be ready in a few hours 😄
Here you go 😉 https://avataaars-api.now.sh 🙌
That is cool! Also I now know about now.sh
It's already done, by Gregory Koberger (@gkoberger): avataaars.io. It's using the same query parameters, e.g. avataaars.io/?avatarStyle=Circle&hairColor=Red
Yeah I just randomized the avatars 😝
All the avatars on IH are the same person but with different background colors & shirts - looking for something like that but with more degrees of freedom
These IH avatars are SVG-based. We designed one, then programmatically created differently colored variants. Perhaps one day we'll open source it?
Have you come across Gravatar (http://gravatar.com/)? It allows users to specify a custom username attached to an email address. If non exists, it displays a random, but consistent, avatar according to a style of your choosing.
Yes I have used gravatars before but I hate that it's just patterns and not people/animals/etc
Gravatar actually has a few different options (identicon, monsterid, wavatar, retro and robohash).
There's also AdorableAvatars (http://avatars.adorable.io/#demo) and RoboHash(https://robohash.org/). Few other sites pop-up when you search for 'random avatar generator'
I did not know that (on the Gravatar)! the other two are perfect. Most of the ones I googled did not have an API or automated method to pull a avatar pic.