Avatarsupport - xmpp and phone contacts

[tbeitter]

In the current version I do not see any avatars, but contact images. As I do not have any sync (or accounts in general) to facebook/g+/xing/etc I have just a few pictures at my contacts. But I like that contacts image approach.

So my suggestion would be:

Get avatars from the xmpp users and phone contacts with an option to prefer one. Maybe xmpp avatars could be the default with a 'phone contact image overrides' setting. I suppose that if a user stored a phone contact image then this one has the recall value for him/her.

Best,
Til

[michiwend]

thats a great idea. I would much appreciate it if the avatars from xmpp accounts could be used and will be overwritten by the phone contact ones by default.

[iNPUTmice]

Since avatars are a (much?) requested feature I did some digging into that. Afaik there are at least three XEPs for that. XEP 0008, XEP 0153, and the PEP based XEP 0084. The first two encode the images in base64 and send them in one stanza which imho is a terrible, terrible idea. I would never implement something like this.

The last one, PEP based approach however sounds kind of okish even though I personally dont really the see use case for PEP in an IM (thats what social networks are for - and infact there are xmpp based social networks out there)
However that would be something I'd be willing to talk/thing about or merge something.

[iNPUTmice]

I like to have pictures of my contacts. In fact this is pretty much the reason Conversations had contact list integration from day one.
I see that adding every jabber contact to your address book might not be a viable option. So I had another, closer, look at the XEPs.

XEP-0153 is the most widely adopted. Unfortunately it's complete garbage. It's not even a proper XEP (as in proposed to become a standard). It's just a write down of what legacy clients did in the past. Images can only be stored in base64. It limits the size to 8KB (which after base64 becomes 32KB + vcard overhead (one always has to download the entire vcard)). The image size is recommended to be 64px and should max out at 96px.
The avatars in Conversations (in the Conversations overview) are, depending on your phones dpi 128px or even larger. So this will basically look like crap.
One has to fetch ones own vcard/avater on every login which on mobile is without stream management can become very very traffic intensive.

XEP-0008 shares a lot of problems with XEP-0153. The only benefit is that one doesn't have the vcard overhead (which isn't that huge). Plus the adoption rate is lower afaik.

XEP-0084 does a very good job on separating meta data and the actual images. One doesn't have to download ones image on every login but just check the meta data. XEP-0084 can handle multiple images in multiple formats and resolutions. So we could offer a general purpose JPEG image in a generic solution (lets say 96px) and a higher res webp image (which is awesome at high compression rates) especially for Conversations. Plus XEP-0084 allows images to be stored on a HTTP server as well. This could work around the base64 problem. (However this is optional)

On the downside the adoption rate of XEP-0084 is lower and it requires the server to support PEP. But a low adoption rate hasn't botherd Conversations in the past if it was the better solution.

TLDR: XEP 0084 is pretty much the only reasonable one to use. In contrary to what i said before PEP (as opposed to pupsub) is actually designed to work with IM.

[iNPUTmice]

XEP - 0084 is working in current HEAD

[ghost]

I have version 0.8.4 from F-Droid.org, but instead of my XMPP partners avatars I see only large letter icons. My server should (hopefully) support XEP-0084, it is prosody 0.9.7. (Xabber shows the avatar images, btw.) Shouldn't this work? TIA!

[steckerhalter]

@MartinBORG I'm also investigating this. It looks like Prosody has PEP enabled by default and also supports XEP-0084 so I wonder why it isn't working.

@iNPUTmice do you have any idea?

http://prosody.im/doc/xeplist

[djmaze]

Having the same problem with Prosody 0.9.8. Anyone having any insights yet?

[5im-0n]

prosody 0.9.10: same problem