A new feature has been introduced in Odoo v10 in the base module: when you enter an email address in the form view of a partner, Odoo will send a query to gravatar.com to get a picture corresponding to the email address.
Gravatar, which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar, is a website where any user can open an account and register a correspondance between his email address and a picture. That way, his picture/avatar will be automatically set on all websites that are connected to gravatar.com: he won't have to manually configure his picture/avatar on every website.
In Odoo, when you enter an email address in the form view of a partner (i.e. triggered via the onchange on the email field) and this partner doesn't have any image yet in Odoo, Odoo will automatically send an HTTPS query to www.gravatar.com with an MD5 hash of the email of the partner. If it receives an answer from gravatar.com in the form of a picture within the 5 seconds timeout, it will set this picture on the image field of the partner in Odoo.
Some people may consider it as a cool feature to easily get picture on partners with no effort.
But other people may consider this as an annoying feature that adds unnecessary network trafic or, worse, as a leak of information. With this feature, gravatar.com is notified of all the email addresses added in the Odoo database, so it may be considered as a leak of information to a third party company (gravatar.com is operated by Automattic Inc., an American company). The problem is that there is no way to disable this feature via a configuration parameter of Odoo. This module brings a solution to this problem: once installed, it disables the feature.
auto_awesome What this module does
AI-generated from the code · Odoo 18.0Stops Odoo from automatically contacting gravatar.com when an email address is entered on a contact. Contacts keep only the images you upload yourself.
This module changes how contact pictures are handled. Normally, when you type an email address on a contact form and that contact has no picture yet, Odoo silently connects to gravatar.com to look for a matching avatar and may set it automatically.
With this module installed, that automatic lookup is turned off. The contact form still works exactly the same way, but no request is sent to gravatar.com and no picture is fetched from there. Only images you upload or set yourself are used.
- Applies to contacts and companies (
res.partner). - No new menus, buttons or screens are added; the change happens behind the scenes.
- No configuration is needed: installing the module is enough.
- Useful when you do not want contact data (email addresses) sent to an external website, or when you want to avoid unwanted pictures appearing on contacts.
It only depends on the web module and does not modify any other business process such as sales, purchases or accounting.
Depends on
Models and fields (1)
- res.partner · extends an existing model
Text generated by AI (DeepSeek) from reading the Odoo 18.0 code on GitHub; it may contain mistakes, so check the code before deciding. View the code on GitHub
Availability by version
Reviewed: 2026-11-03Confirmation status: 7 confirmed, 2 with no information of 9 versions.
Sources · Odoo 18.0
Confirmed on 2026-11-03 in branch 18.0 of OCA/partner-contact.
terminal Installation and usage
No verified informationInstallation instructions, the distribution package, dependencies and configuration steps are not shown because they have not yet been verified in the module documentation for any version.
Data imported from GitHub: this sheet reflects the latest catalog review, not a live lookup. Always check the module documentation and staging before installing in production.