Hey there, Good Lookin!!!

Faces. There's nothing else that our brains distinguish so quickly and so consistently. Most of us might struggle to remember names, but we'll rarely forget a face, even though we see hundreds of thousands of them.

Today we're excited to announce the first of a number of improvements to introduce faces - or as they're known in the industry, "avatars" - to Accelo. 

Initially, we're featuring pictures of users as well as clients in a few select screens in Accelo, including in the top right of each page, in the schedule screen, and of course in our new Activity Screen. To take advantage of this new feature - and cut back on the number of grey "mystery men" icons, we recommend you upload your own picture to Accelo.

Uploading your Profile Picture

Rather than making Accelo yet another place for you to upload your profile picture, we've chosen to work with the great team at Gravatar to supply profile pictures in Accelo. Gravatar is a service provided by the people behind Wordpress, the world's largest and most successful blogging platform - they're completely trustworthy, and they make their service available free of charge to help improve the experience of their blog readers and customers.

The way it works is that you upload your profile picture to the secure Gravatar service and link/tie to your email address (after verifying your email address with them).

Accelo then uses your email address to look up the Gravatar profile picture index, and it also means that as other people - colleagues and clients - upload their own profile pictures to the service, their pictures will start to appear in Accelo too!

The first thing to do is log into your Accelo deployment.

Once you log in, click on your name  in the top right, and in the drop down list select "Profile" and load up your profile page.

If you already have a Gravatar linked to your email address, you'll see your picture displayed on your profile page, with a handy link you can use to log into Gravatar to update/change it.

If you haven't uploaded a picture linked to your email account, you'll see a grey "mystery man" image, and a link to log into Gravatar and upload a picture.

When you click on "Log in with Gravatar", you'll be directed to the Gravatar website. If you already have an account there you can simply log in, but if you don't, don't worry - signing up for an account is free. We've highlighted the "sign up for free" link in the screen shot below.

If you choose to sign up, you just need to enter your email address. The Gravatar service will then send you an email to confirm that you in fact have access to that address, so go to your inbox, and when the email arrives, click on the link inside it.

When you click on the link, you'll need to specify a username and password. The username is important because Gravatar allows you to have your profile picture linked to multiple email accounts, or you can of course have different pictures for your different identities. The username is how you get in to make changes later, but don't worry too much - you can always just log in with one of your email addresses.

Now you've got an account, you just need to upload a picture! Simply click on the "Add one by clicking here" link (highlighted in yellow below) once you've logged in to upload a picture.

You can then upload an image, crop it to adjust, and set a "rating" (you'll just want to choose "G"). Then you can save it, and you're all done! 

When you next log into Accelo, you'll see your picture in the top right, as well as on your activity stream, profile page and more!

We hope you enjoy all the new smiling faces in Accelo - if you've got any questions, please don't hesitate to email [email protected].