Knowledge Base Article

Aurora: Manage avatars for your community

You can manage the avatars for your community from the Theme editor's avatar settings. Open the Account menu and go to Designer > Theme > Avatars.

You can set the avatar and its visual style in your community. You can also turn on the option for default avatars that are set automatically and randomly whenever a new member joins the community. We provide 12 out of the box, but you can also add custom ones to this set.

Set the visual style

You can set the visual style of the avatar using the following options:

  • Circle: (Default) Member avatars appear as circles.
  • Sq rounded: Member avatars appear as squares with rounded corners. Use the slider to set the Corner radius (default is 3 px).
  • Square: Member avatars appear as squares.

Add custom avatars

You can add custom avatars to the default avatar set available to your community members. When members go to update their avatars from their personal settings, they can choose between the out-of-the-box avatars or any of the  custom ones you’ve added.

To add custom avatars:

  1. Click Add custom avatars.
  2. In the Add Custom Avatars window, upload as many images as you want in SVG, JPG, or PNG formats. A square image is required with a minimum of 300px by 300px recommended.
  3. Click Add Avatars.
  4. Click Save and Publish.

Members can now select the newly added custom avatars when they choose their profile avatar.

Default avatar set

To include the default avatars for your community, turn on the Include default avatar set option. The default avatar set includes 12 default avatars for your community.

Related topics:
Updated 5 months ago
Version 24.0
  • Are there any controls about how big the avatars are? I know certainly as a page is built to be responsive the avatars must respect the layout. I ask because our members are feeling that avatar images are a bit small, especially for our older audience.  It would be great to be able to make the Avatars a bit bigger than they are on Hermes so it's more obvious who's who.  Communities have been around enough that the demographics of communities now serve members into older age and deteriorating eye-sight so we must be inclusive of people of all ages and visual strength, independent of accessibility.

  • LarryI's avatar
    LarryI
    Khoros Expert

    MarkSchwanke Not yet, but we have discussed more recently as we are still working on avatars and avatar collections.  I'll raise your excellent point with our design team to see what we need and what we can do to improve accessibility with avatars.

    Edit: I will say we are accessible in terms of using Zoom controls within the browser to enlarge text and images.

  • thanks LarryI @there’s more to figure out though.


    I’m finding that many people only have their phone as their way to access the internet even older people who are on fixed income.  While yes they can use zoom in their browser on their computer to enlarge the experience.  If they know about it.  It can make the experience unbearable to use the community.  Yes you can enlarge things on your phone as well but it can become a bad experience as well.  Why not just make some things a little bigger from the get go and anticipate accidental zooms. 


    Do this   Get a mouse with a scroll wheel and a volunteer 70 or older who would say they’re not tech savvy . Maybe your parent can be a volunteer . Get a 15-17” monitor. Then show them Hermes private messages at 100% zoom.   Then instruct them how to use scroll wheel on mouse to zoom their browser up to  their preferred level on the community Home Screen. Then send them a PM and have them return to the messages area to read the message and see their feedback  

    All the time I’m helping members adjust their zoom on their computer because they’ve zoomed in on accident and then can’t read their PMs at all.

    Aurora should offer a better experience than hermes does. 


    fyi. When you do an @mention it will auto add another @ on the next word even when not indenting to from the phone.  Happens here on Atlas and my computer.  Seems to be a bug.  See above on word there’s 

  • Is there a limit as to how many custom avatars we can add for users to choose from?