Update – we have now built the BuddyPress extension right into the full version of Google Profile Avatars. If you are using BuddyPress and Google Profile Avatars but aren’t seeing Google profile photos throughout your site, please get in touch to ask for version 1.1 of the plugin.

We provide a small plugin extension called Google Profile Avatars that takes your users’ Google profile photos and substitutes them in place of the user’s WordPress avatar pictures throughout your site. That brings an easy level of personalization to the site, and saves users having to upload a photo directly – which they often won’t take the time to do anyway.

However, some customers use BuddyPress to enhance their WordPress site, and find that the Google Profile Avatars plugin doesn’t work for them. The reason is that BuddyPress chooses to use its own ‘avatar’ system rather than relying on WordPress’ built-in avatars (which our plugin modifies to pull in profile photos from Google).

For these BuddyPress sites, it would be great if all three of these profile photo systems – WordPress’, BuddyPress’, and Google’s – could all be unified…

So we have put together an example plugin for BuddyPress users that attempts to do exactly that! You can download our GoogleBuddy code here.

Feel free to try it out and let us know how you get on. Please note you will also need to buy and install the original Google Profile Avatars plugin (which requires at least the free version of Google Apps Login).

Update – we have now built the BuddyPress extension right into the full version of Google Profile Avatars. If you are using BuddyPress and Google Profile Avatars but aren’t seeing Google profile photos throughout your site, please get in touch to ask for version 1.1 of the plugin.