The Extra Theme lets you easily add an author biography box to the end of your posts. When enabled, the box will show a description of the post author along with, in some cases, an image of the author. But what if the author bio image isn’t showing? It’s not necessarily obvious how to get it to show up.

The author image is actually based on the Gravatar service. Basically WordPress uses the author’s email (as given in the author’s user profile) to look up the profile picture of the author, as stored by Gravatar. If you don’t have an author image registered to your email address on the Gravatar site, no image will show in Extra.

Gravatar is run by Automattic, the team behind WordPress. For this reason, it uses WordPress.com login accounts. So to start using Gravatar, visit the Gravatar home page, click on “Create your own Gravatar”. You’ll then be asked to sign in using your WordPress.com account / register for one. Whichever option you choose, you should be using the same email address as you have configured in your user profile on the site using Extra. Once done, you’ll be able to access your Gravatar account and upload a profile picture. This should then start showing up in Extra’s author bio box (there may be a short delay).

Please note that the Gravatar you upload may be displayed in other locations, such as on any comments you’ve posted to other WordPress sites. Also, each author will need to create their own Gravatar / WordPress.com and upload their own image.