Rename "Avatar" to "Profile Photo"

[sooskriszta]

At the moment, we use the term "Avatar" to refer to primary images uploaded by members. This might partly be due to the fact that BuddyPress pulls "avatars" from Gravatar.

I propose that we rename this to "Profile Photo"

There is a definite desire to encourage users to upload profile photos #4132 The gravatar connection is tenuous.

"Profile photo" is better than "Avatar" for several reasons:

• Profile photo is universally understood and translatable. Avatar is not.
• Profile photo does, somewhat boringly, exactly what it says on the can. Avatar can be a bit ambiguous, childish or nerdy (depending on the context).
• Profile photo has "photo" in the term. We want to encourage those. Avatar has the connotation of a graphic or illustration (check out my avatar on bp.org and contrast it with jjj's profile photo). And no, I'm not talking out of my a## here. The likes of Yahoo! allow both ​profile photos/pictures/images and ​avatars They are by no means alone in this regard. Compare ​Live profile images and ​Xbox avatars.
• Profile photo is the near-universal terminology and has higher usability even for people not intimately familiar with the English language. What do I mean by near-universal? Here are some users of "Profile Photo" (or similar): ​Facebook, ​Twitter, ​LinkedIn, ​Google+/Blogger/Youtube, ​Meetup, etc.

[DJPaul]

Sure, sounds good. If you're able to work on a patch, we could get the change into 2.1.

[DJPaul]

Also, please don't CC anyone from the core team into your tickets. We really do read every ticket, anyway. :)

[sooskriszta]

Sorry about that. I just cc'd the folks that discussed this in devchat a few weeks ago.

Will have to look up how to submit patches again, but this seems easy enough...

[sooskriszta]

Changes "Avatar" to "Profile Photo"

[DJPaul]

Thanks for working on a patch. We'll take a look at changes soon, hopefully over the next few days.

[DJPaul]

There's a couple of places where we should tweak the capitalisation, but apart from that, this is fine.

[djpaul]

In 8677:

Rename "Avatar" to "Profile Photo".

"Profile photo" is probably more easily understood by most people (and translators), and better describes what BuddyPress' member and group avatar features actually are; that we're asking for a person's photograph. Sometimes, avatar can mean "graphic" or "illustration".

This subtle change in phrasing also makes BuddyPress more consistent with the significant majority of other online platform services (Twitter, Facebook, etc).

Fixes #5758, props sooskriszta

[djpaul]

In 8678:

More "Avatar" to "Profile Photo" renaming.

See #5758 and r8677

[johnjamesjacoby]

In 9397:

Replace "avatar" with "profile photo" in admin area. Fixes #6151. See #5758.