I want to remove/change my profile image from this forum. Is there any other option to achieve that other than deleting my account completely?
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Hello @user_not_found ,
Yes, you can remove your profile photo – however you cannot remove it from just this forum (Local Guides Connect), as your profile photo is connected to your Google (user) Account, and whatever options you select there will appear across all Google platforms (forums, etc.).
To remove your profile photo from your Google account this help guide will get you to the right place. Perhaps the easiest way to begin is to go to google.com in your browser and continue from there. Of course, you wanna be sure you are signed in ; )
You will see / can click on your profile photo, and if you have other photos in your G+ account you will likely be presented with a bunch of photos offered to replace your current photo. However, if you look carefully towards the bottom of the photos you will see “No Photo”. ← Click on that ; )
You will need to refresh your browser, or you can sign out and sign back in again to see that your photo has been removed and replaced with an initial – the first letter of the first name in your profile.
Sorry, this answer is so long … removing your photo isn’t (IMNHO) the most intuitive process there is on your profile page.
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@MapWrangler Thanks. I actually don’t want to remove my Google profile image completely - but considering that this is a separate forum software that doesn’t even let me use my actual name (as used in my Google profile) as user name, I thought that removing the profile image might be an option.
If this is not the case, I’ll just leave this forum (and the LG program) completely in a while.
@user_not_found ,
Well, I think you can change your username in this forum, separate from what’s in your Google profile (or the same if that’s your wish). I recall (vaguely) when I first logged on to Local Guides Connect, the username that was, I think, “assigned” to me wasn’t at all what I wanted.
You may know more about this than I do! That said, if you click on the gear icon at the top right of the page it opens your settings – for this forum. On the left of the page that opens is the option to change/edit your username. If you want to use, as you mentioned, your actual name (which appears in your Google profile) it would seem that you could enter it there – which admittedly is a backward and convoluted method to use your actual name. (There is an additional location to change your username here.)
Apologies if you already know and have tried all of this. On a different note, since the change/rework of the forum to version 2.0 I find options to set the settings for features that no longer seem to work – like tags. And the message quote feature – which is a very effective tool IMNHO used in forums worldwide has been removed as well.
[edited to add additional option for changing user name]
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@MapWrangler Thanks again. 
I probably should have explained a bit better what I was referring to regarding the username issue. My Google profile has my full name, but when this forum was first made available, it was shortened to given name plus first letter of family name, and I think I remember someone explaining that this was done for privacy reasons. Later, I was prompted to change my username whenever I logged on, but I admit I just ignored that for months and it worked. It no longer does, so I just changed my name to just a row of X’s earlier this week.
So, my question is less how to change my username, but more why I can’t make my profile image here different from my profile image on the rest of Google, when exactly this is what is already happening with my name.
Full disclosure: the reason I want to change my profile image is because I’m currently not too happy with the services Google has to offer, both generally and regarding Maps/LG stuff specifically. I want to remove my image and then not visit this place for a while, just to allow myself to return eventually. If this is not possible, I’d rather shut the door completely by deleting my account on this platform.
Hello @user_not_found ,
If you would like to exit the Local Guides program, the way to do this is to follow this link:
Local Guides Home, then scroll to the bottom of the page and click Exit Program.
Exiting the program will not delete your Google Maps contribution, they will stay available until manually deleted. I should also mention that there is no way for us to delete the contributions for you, you will need to delete them yourself.
When you exit the program your profile on Local Guides Connect will appear as anonymous and no one is going to be able to access it.
If privacy is what you are worried about, my personal suggestion is to head over to the security settings of your account and double check what securities you would like to employ.