After a lot of tinkering, fiddling, poking, and prodding we’ve revamped the image support in gravatar. Now if you upload a GIF or a PNG we will preserve any transparency that might be in the image and serve that image to you as a PNG.

Unfortunately this does not retroactively fix existing images with black instead of transparent backgrounds. You’ll want to re-upload your transparent images, assign the new image to your email addresses. After that, give it about 30 minutes and clear your cache. Everything should work and look just fine.

A note for all you webmasters out there: If you’re worried about what transparent PNG images look like for your IE visitors, I would recommend taking a look at this handy Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 page which offers an explanation, information on workarounds, and a drop-in javascript which will work for all the images on a page.

Until next time – happy blogging!