BuddyPress.org

Hi @multimartin

I just tried searching the WP plugin repo and came across an old plugin that may be of some help. Take a look at Remove Avatars

Humm.. not helpful then. In that case we might have to try doing it manually. Perhaps try disabling the filter which replaces the WP avatars with BP avatars. For example, add this to your theme’s functions.php file:

remove_filter( 'get_avatar', 'bp_core_fetch_avatar_filter', 10, 5 );

I think you can disable the Gravatar fallback as well with this:

add_filter( 'bp_core_fetch_avatar_no_grav', '__return_true' );

If that doesn’t work, you may need to replace all occurrences of bp_core_fetch_avatar() with get_avatar() in your templates. But cross that bridge when you come to it.

Ref: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_avatar

Actually scratch that last post – it’s now displaying the avatars as the WordPress avatars in the back-end but not the front end

In that case, I think we’ve just crossed that bridge hehe. i.e the next step will be to replace all instances of bp_core_fetch_avatar() in your front-end templates with get_avatar()

It will do, sort of indirectly, actually. For more info on how it works, check out the Template Hierarchy article.

If your theme doesn’t explicitly use BuddyPress templates then the default templates will be used. For a quick look at the templates check out the GitHub repo.

I’m guessing your theme doesn’t explicitly use the templates so what you’d have to do is create them yourself. The general idea is to create a folder called buddypress inside your theme and then add the templates you’d like to customise to that folder. So for example, you’d end up with /wp-content/themes/your-theme/buddypress/. Everything goes inside there.

There might actually be more things you’d need to do. For example, the bp_get_message_thread_avatar() function uses bp_core_fetch_avatar() so you would need to filter that using bp_get_message_thread_avatar etc.

Unless someone else knows of an easier way, it seems as though it’ll be a big task of going through everything. You’d also need to be comfortable with PHP.

Alternatively, you could try disabling avatars by adding this to your bp-custom.php file

define( 'BP_SHOW_AVATARS', false );

Note: I’ve not tested that, I’m just going on what I see at the beginning of the bp_core_fetch_avatar() function. i.e:

// If avatars are disabled for the root site, obey that request and bail
if ( ! buddypress()->avatar->show_avatars )
   return;