Hello developers!
Today I want to show a simple solution to display avatar and cover in your app using identifiable url.
Why this solution? If you are building an app for Steem and would like to show user avatar, the quick solution would be to show directly the image URL from the user json_metadata.profile.image. It's working but have few downsides:
- It's not optimized. Your users might have to download some really heavy files and / or with a different aspect ratio.
- Original image link might be broken and fail to load.
- It allows anyone to track you users. If you show original image within you app someone might get your users IP, user agent or store cookie to them.
That's why Busy created this service. It allows 3p apps to display avatar without having to deal with this concern, the image is optimized you can choose the size, it's fast, and if the link of the image is broken it will show a default image.
So how to use it? You can simply create link like this to get 
https://img.busy.org/@hellosteem
or add this HTML code:
<img src="https://img.busy.org/@hellosteem" />
There is few optionals parameters that you can use:
sorsizefor changing the width and height of the image, for example here is how to create a 10 x 10px avatar ofworwidthfor set the width,horheightfor the height example: https://img.busy.org/@hellosteem?width=100&height=300dordefaultto set a different default picture example: https://img.busy.org/@siol?d=https://goo.gl/V8GmMm
If the user doesn't have a profile image or the image fail to load, we will show a default avatar. The default avatar can appear in multiple colors, the color being based on user id.
These parameters works also for cover picture. You can get cover like this:
https://img.busy.org/@fabien/cover
We are very proud to have few apps using our service already like DTube, ChainBB or MangoSteem and we encourage others apps to use it too! Here is some statistics about last month usage:
This service was running under the URL img.steemconnect.com previously but we had to depreciate it unfortunately, if you already using this service please update to the new url img.busy.org before we close the steemconnect URL (within 1 month).
This post rewards will be sent to 
https://github.com/busyorg/busy-img
Have a good Steem!