The Gravatar plugin I wrote is a simple way to add avatars to your site, but some folks prefer not to rely on an external service that might go down unexpectedly or they’d just prefer to have their avatars stored locally similar to many message forums out there. Fortunately Mark Malewski has written a plugin and a tutorial that will allow you to provide your visitors with a means of selecting an avatar from a predefined directory you set up yourself. Go check out his Avatar Gallery Plugin Tutorial Part 1 and Avatar Gallery Plugin Tutorial Part 2 for all the details on how to pull this off yourself.
Thank you!!
I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while now, and not rely on external servers for it ... now I can!