You may have noticed some people using avatars today. I believe @rossenpavlov was the first to post about it here but I wanted to post CLI instructions and figured there could be more grandma-proof visual aid for steemit.com instructions as well, simple as it may be.

I suggest you use a square image as it looks like images are getting stretched or pinched in the resizing, making them look goofy.

On steemit.com

You can set your avatar using steemit.com by visiting any of your personal account pages (@youraccount), accessible via the circle icon in the upper right, and clicking the Settings tab, all the way on the right past the Wallet tab:

Host your image on a free image hoster such as steemimg.com or imgur.com, copy and paste the image URL into the field and hit the update button. You will be prompted to enter your active or owner keys, or your master password.

In the future this page will have more options including different language support!

Command line interface

If you're like me and are cautious about using your active authority key on the web, here's how you set an avatar using the cli_wallet. The avatar is stored in an account's JSON metadata, and can be set using the update_account_meta command. I want my metadata to look like this: {"profile":{"profile_image":"https://i.imgur.com/Onc31p4.png"}} but the internal quotation marks get in the way of the command syntax, so they need to be escaped using the \ character like so:

update_account_meta pfunk "{\"profile\":{\"profile_image\":\"https://i.imgur.com/Onc31p4.png\"}}" true

Fill in your own account name and image URL for the avatar. The quotation marks surrounding the JSON should not be escaped. Be sure that you include any existing JSON metadata that your account is presently using so it's not removed.