Before I start with my problem, I'd like to relay some information about user habits. I've just started a new site which only has 20 users at present. Eighteen (18) of those users have complained that they can't upload photos or avatars. I have photos set for 3meg and avatars for 1 meg.

I installed Avatar History because I liked the idea of avatar photos being in a separate album and increased the upload size to 4 meg to help my hapless users. As a test I uploaded a 2.5meg photo and was delighted to see a single photo in the album a mere 35kb in size. - Perfect!

I then went to userfiles/plugins/base/avatars and fell over backwards when I discovered four (4) additional photos of the same avatar:

1.        4 kb avatar_1 4kb (The small avatar used everywhere)
2.      15 kb Avatar_big_1 (the main Avatar but wasn't that in the Avatar History folder also?)
3. 1,600 kb Avatar_orgiinal_1
4. 2,240 kb  Avatar original (in a tmp) folder.

All in all, a total of 3,894 kb of photos to produce a total of 19 or 39kb.

If 1,000 users use large photos, that's a wastage of 3.7 gigabytes.

This is pretty serious stuff considering that it shouldn't be too hard to delete all those unwanted files once the avatar has been created. Today people upload stuff from their phones and they don't have a clue how to compress or crop so this problem isn't going away.

Sergey, I'm not blaming you for this because the same thing happens with photo uploads. As Oxwall aren't likely to address the problem for years, can you you add a few lines to your Avatar History script to delete all the unnecessary avatar photos? If it affects a person's chance to re crop the photo, let them upload it again.