Blogger stores four copies of your blogger profile photo. I know that now, after deleting the "extra" ones. They are all the same size when clicked, and they look the same...but they aren't.
I try to be neat and tidy with my websites and clean up duplicate files. I suspected that the files were used at different sizes within Blogger, but it was hard to tell for sure, so I deleted the "dups" with a view towards seeing what broke. It would be simple to upload another pic to fix any problems with missing copies of the photo, right? It almost worked.
Unintended consequences
After uploading a replacement image, I checked my Picasa page, where the photos are stored. Four new copies of the image had been created. The problem is that avatar image links, attached to previous posts, did not automatically update. They were all broken, pointing to the old image link, with no way to fix them. New posts displayed the current blogger profile photo.
The response to my question on the blogger support forum confirmed that nothing could be done. The links would always sit there stupidly displaying a broken image icon. I had to remove the links or cringe every time I looked at them. I deleted them, replacing a few with new comments.
Avoid unintended consequences
Don't delete your old profile photos. It seems logical that if you figured out which of the old profile photos is used as an avatar with old comments and kept it, in Picasa Web Albums, all would be well. Nevertheless, I don't want to test that shaky assumption after what happened.
For some insight, I copied the Blogger avatar image link and compared it with the image links in Picasa Web Albums. There is a partial match, not an exact one, with the matching photo in Picasa. The (more or less) matching links (with added line breaks) are shown below. Note that the size of the blogger image is 45px, and the Picasa image, 128px.
Blogger:
3.bp.blogspot.com/_N5Sn0iBWDNU/SztSqfFEItI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/
WickItEcQwQ/S45/file.jpg
Picasa:
lh5.ggpht.com/_N5Sn0iBWDNU/SztSqfFEItI/AAAAAAAAAJ8/
fN6s2QzrtXA/s128/file.jpg
The missing piece of information is knowing exactly how blogger manages profile images in conjunction with its Picasa service. The avatar link goes to blogspot.com, but copies are stored on Picasa. If you delete the images in Picasa web albums, the Blogger images seem to disappear. There's some fogginess about whether Blogger actually keeps replaced profile images on its servers, even if copies of the old ones are available at Picasa. Without making a sandbox blog and spending time testing results, I can't say it's one way or the other. So far, I haven't been able to find anything written up that would clarify the process.
Blogger support for Gravatar would also prevent the problem of broken avatar links. Given the popularity of Gravatar, and suggestions for including it in a future Blogger upgrade, the problem may be self-limiting for Gravatar users. That would be a good thing.
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