BuddyPress.org

I am trying to use the following code to turn user avatars to greyscale.

It has never worked, but I am not sure why. I can do it temporarily via CSS, just to show how it will look (that’s not an issue) but would prefer the actual avatars to be greyscale
Please help

//Convert to greyscale
add_filter('xprofile_avatar_uploaded','rb_bw_filter', 10, 2);

function rb_bw_filter($meta) {

//    $path = wp_upload_dir(); // get upload directory
//    $file = $path['basedir'].'/'.$meta['file']; // Get full size image
$file =  bp_core_fetch_avatar(array('item_id' => $other_user, 'type' => 'full','html'=>false));
   $files[] = explode(',' ,$file); // Set up an array of image size urls
//    foreach ($meta['sizes'] as $size) {
//       $files[] = $path['path'].'/'.$size['file'];
//    }

    foreach ($files as $file) { // iterate through each image size

        // Convert image to grayscale credit to http://ottopress.com/2011/customizing-wordpress-images/

        list($orig_w, $orig_h, $orig_type) = @getimagesize($file);
        $image = wp_load_image($file);
        imagefilter($image, IMG_FILTER_GRAYSCALE);
        switch ($orig_type) {
            case IMAGETYPE_GIF:
                imagegif( $image, $file );
                break;
            case IMAGETYPE_PNG:
                imagepng( $image, $file );
                break;
            case IMAGETYPE_JPEG:
                imagejpeg( $image, $file );
                break;
        }
    }
    return $meta;
}