Setting the user avatar/picture doesn't seem to work for custom images in 25.04

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1

Ubuntu Version:
25.04

Desktop Environment (if applicable):
GNOME

Problem Description:
Setting the user avatar/picture doesn’t seem to work for custom images.
I can use the built in images, it shows up in the Users user preview and I see a ~500k file with my username show up in /var/lib/AccountsService/icons.
I select jpgs or pngs I used in 22.04 through 24.10 and a mostly-blank image shows up in the preview, and a ~1200 byte binary file shows up in /var/lib/AccountsService/icons. It appears to be a transparent 512x512 png file.

If there is a new limit on an image attribute in 25.04 (e.g. height, width, original type), I can’t figure it out.

Relevant System Information:
Tailing syslog when I change images doesn’t appear to log anything useful/interesting.

Screenshots or Error Messages:

What I’ve Tried:
Different png’s and jpg’s, going back to the built-ins, tailing syslog the entire time. Rebooting. Updating. Googling for 25.04 avatar/picture issues. Searching discourse for avatar or picture issues, sorted by date. Rethinking my life’s choices.

2

Definitely there’s a bug. The same problem exists for Gnome 48 on Archlinux

I don’t know why it’s doing it, but there is a workaround. In a terminal use the gsettings command to add a directory containing the image(s) that you want use as the user avatar so that the image(s) will appear in the gnome-control-center’s default list of avatars.

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface avatar-directories "['/home/yourusername/Pictures/faces', '/usr/share/pixmaps/faces']"

Now you should see your image(s) included with the default list and if you select one, gnome-control-center will copy the image to /var/lib/AccountService/icons and rename it to your usename as you’ve discovered.

Couple of caveats:

  1. gnome-control-center will convert all images to a png format. It will also attempt to resize images to a 512x512 resolution unless the image is already smaller than that. And it’s built-in image conversion code seems to be just broke if it’s used on images outside of configured avatar directories.
  2. The cropping feature does not work if you add a directory and select an image from it, even if its bigger than 512x512

Until the bug is fixed, if you still want to use a custom avatar image with 25.04, it’s best to use an image editor and modify the image to 512x512 (or something smaller), save to a png format and put it in a configured avatar directory.

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