Reader David Craig’s spouse prefers a picture-less login. He writes:
My wife and I share a Power Mac G4 running OSX Tiger 10.4.2. I like having a picture with my login, but she would prefer to have nothing. Is there a way to remove it?
Not exactly. You can certainly have a really uninteresting picture (a blank image), but you’ll still see an empty box when you log in. If this will suffice, I’d do this by simply replacing the image with an all-white image. To do so, open an empty window, press Shift-Command-4 to invoke the Selection Screen Shot doohickie, and select an area of white to create a white .png image.
Launch System Preferences, choose Accounts, select your wife’s account, click the Picture tab, click the Edit button, and drag the white .png image you created. A white box will appear in the image pane when your wife next logs in.
Of course you can also apply this hint to change the login image from the stock images supplied by Apple to a favorite picture of your guinea pig.
Note that changing an image in Accounts will also change the corresponding Me image in Address Book.
One way of avoiding any kind of picture at login is to select Login Options in the Accounts system preference and, under Display Login Window As, enable the Name and Password option. With this option enabled, you and your wife will see a box that contains name and password fields when you login rather than a list of users accompanied by pictures.