outline / tiley

A colorful default avatar generator for your application

Tiley

An alternative to the default Gravatar's that is quick and easy to use. Tiley creates consistent colored squares with initials that can be used for default avatars, they look like this:

How to use

Basic Request

Tiley images may be requested just like a normal image, using an IMG tag. To ensure that tiley always returns the same color for a user you must pass a unique identifier - we recommend a hash of the users email address or a database id. The second parameter is the users initials which must be 1 or 2 letters:

https://tiley.herokuapp.com/avatar/HASH/INITIALS.FORMAT

For example:

https://tiley.herokuapp.com/avatar/205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50/TM.svg

File formats available are png, svg and jpg. We recommend using svg if possible.

Size

By default, images are presented at 100px by 100px if no size parameter is supplied. You may request a specific image size by using the s= parameter and passing a single pixel dimension (since the images are square):

https://tiley.herokuapp.com/avatar/205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50/TM.png?s=500

Color

By default, image background colors are dynamically generated using the unique identifier. You may request a specific background color by using the c= parameter and passing a hex value without the "#" symbol: https://tiley.herokuapp.com/avatar/205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50/JK.png?c=DADB0D

Hosting

We recommend running your own instance of Tiley, however there is an instance running on the Heroku free plan at https://tiley.herokuapp.com that you are welcome to use for low traffic applications. This instance will be shut down soon due to Heroku free plans ending.

The best way to use Tiley is to pass the url as the default parameter when constructing a gravatar url - this means that you can show your users gravatar if it's available and then fallback to a tiley. It would look something like this (don't forget to URL encode):

https://www.gravatar.com/avatar/205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50?s=200&d=https%3A%2F%2Ftiley.herokuapp.com%2Favatar%2F205e460b479e2e5b48aec07710c08d50/TM.svg%3Fs%3D200

Installation

You can run your own copy of tiley easily on Heroku:

Development

Tiley depends on imageMagick, on OSX you can install it using Homebrew:

brew install imagemagick

On Heroku it's already installed and on linux you should use your package manager of choice.

yarn install
yarn start

This will begin a process on port 3004 by default, so navigate to "http://localhost:3004" to access the tiley instance.