Introducing Profile Photos

Tracker has always believed in software as a team sport. We are a tool built to help teams collaborate and build better software—not just faster, but together. But for a tool that helps people collaborate, we’ve always represented people by initials that—except in rare examples—don’t really capture your teammates’ personalities, or scan easily. On larger teams, there are often many people with the same initials and it can be confusing to keep the many combinations of letters from becoming an infuriating alphabet soup. This leads to an unnecessary burden and overhead cost of working with many people.

Enter: Profile photos

You can now add a profile photo that will appear in place of your initials in Tracker so that you can best define how you want to appear and quickly identify who is working on what! Your photo will appear in the Owners and Requesters fields, as well as alongside your comments. Initials will remain the default, but profile photos have caught fire as we’ve been beta testing it on our team. Here’s what we’ve already learned about Team Tracker since we started using profile photos:

• One of our devs closely identifies with manatees;
• At least six of us have adorable cats (the dog quotient remains smaller but legitimate);
• A certain PM (cough cough) has a stuffed animal that she travels with and maintains an Instagram for;
• There are people on the team who very closely resemble MySpace Tom;
• There are some of us who don’t know who MySpace Tom is; and
• There are many levels of Trekkie fandom.

Toteymoo in Bagan, Myanmar.

Adding your profile photo

Here’s what you want to do to add your profile photo:

1. Go to your Profile page by clicking on your username.
2. Within the new My Profile Photo section, click on Upload profile photo.
3. You can now pick and crop a photo that will become your profile photo.

Alternatively, in Stories view (aka, your project):

1. Mouse over the circles with your initials.
2. Click Edit my profile photo.
3. You can now pick and crop a photo that will become your profile photo.

Tip: Mousing over a person’s profile photo reveals a card with their photo (bigger, so you can see more detail), name, username, and initials so you can put a face to the username.

At the end of the day, after all, your teammates are people: full, well-rounded, fascinating, and somewhat odd humans. The more you get to know them, the easier collaboration gets and the better you’ll function as a team.

As always, we value your input and would love to know how profile photos are working out for you. Please get in touch via the Provide Feedback widget under Help in any project, contact us on Twitter, or email us.