Thanks for the point in the right direction.  If I simply rename the folder vendor/elgg/elgg/views/default/river/relationship/friend to friend.bak am I going to create some issue or is there a more delicate and correct way to suppress it.

Appreciate all the help you guys give to us out here.

A little backstory to help this make more sense.  This is an adult couples site with a membership of a couple thousand.  The VPS host that starts with Arvi** lost several years worth of data with some type of hardware failure and nothing could be recovered.  After a month of them stalling they finally gave up on any data recovery or backup restore.  I bit the bullet and went with the newest version of Elgg even with limited plugin updates to help with update issues in the future.  It might have been wiser to go with a 2.xx version because all of the plugins that are perfected but with a major version change went the way we did.

So after a period of dead time with the site not even loading I moved to a different host and now members are finding it and searching out their old friends.  Each new member probably averages about 7 to 10 new friends from day one.  That is what is flooding the river display.  Everything meaningful posted is buried several pages back.  

Don’t Modify Core

Use My plugin for Elgg 3 and try to make all changes there but not in the /vendor folder.

Also, there's a related discussion.

It's quite impossible to see which plugins you actually have installed on your site by just copy+pasting the plugin page output. Without the layout the plugin names are quite lost within the other link texts that are of no use here. If you want to make it easier for people to help you, edit the list and leave just a list of the plugin names.

Using 3rd party plugin not updated for Elgg 3 will cause problems. If it's not a very, very simple plugin it will very likely NOT work without problems on Elgg 3 and might even cause other problems on your site you might not connect with this plugin in the first place.

My suggestion: test with ALL 3rd party plugins disabled. ALL of them! Does the problem remain or do you see the profile images correctly displayed for all users? Try to narrow down the possible cause of the problem by activating only one or two plugins at a time and not all at once. Otherwise it's impossible to figure out what's wrong if you don't have some experience.

In any case it might help to look into the server logs to see if any errors are to be found that might explain what the problem might be.

The image size you've set for Tidypics has nothing to do with profile images. It's for the Tidypics images alone. The image size seems really quite large. If you think you need the original image saved at this size I would suggest to use the ImageMagick command line tools for creation of the thumbnails. The GD php extension would require a massive amount of RAM for an 8kx8k image - too much probably.

But Tidypics is a plugin not yet updated for Elgg 3. The version you find here will not work without problems for sure!! There's a version available at https://github.com/rohit1290/tidypics that might work better (maybe without any issues even) on Elgg 3. But I had no time yet to test it out and merge it into my version and make a new release for Elgg 3.

The hype* plugins for Elgg 3 are only to be found on github. I hope you have used these versions only.

Profile image thumbnail creation should work also with either the GD php extension (default) or the Imagick php extension (if available on the server). If the php memory_limit is set too small the thumbnail creation might fail with the GD extension used which might also explain the profiles without a proper image. If you have the Imagick php extension installed (or can get it installed) it would help because the memory required for resizing would be much lower (and also for Tidpics the Imagick php extension could be selected in case the ImageMagick command line tools are not available on the server).

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply on this one.  I did get the tidypics from github as well as the hype plugins.  I did find there was one hype plugin that didn't install correctly but was able to make a little change to get it to install.  

I am going to go with the imagick option or at least give it a try.  The only reason I made the image options so huge was to see if increasing them would resolve the problem.  I could easily live with smaller images so the imagick option hopefully will help deal with that.  

Iionly, you really rock by updating and creating the plugins that really matter for our sites and thank you for pointing me in the right direction.  Always happy to help test out the modules you maintain if you ever need it.  

Thanks!

The max image resolution you can set in the Tidypics settings is for client-side resizing of images (done on the uploader's computer before the actual upload). This works only with the HTML5 uploader (and the image quality is not the best when using this kind of resizing).

Other images apart from images uploaded with Tidypics not showing is most likely caused by limitations set for the php variables in Elgg's .htaccess file especially when using the GD php extension (used by default when not selected imagick in Elgg's settings.php file as alternative). With the GD extension the main limitation causing especially larger images missing their thumbnails is the value of memory_limit. By default it's 64M. Setting it to 128M can help a lot already (setting it even larger might help some more but the RAM of the server is also to be taken into account as the memory_limit is per session, i.e. more users in parallel could be much higher memory requirements!). Secondly, the post_max_size might also have to be increased (also when using Tidpics or other plugins that allow uploading several files at once). For example, setting upload_max_filesize (maximum allowed size of a single file) to 5M and allowing 10 images to be uploaded with Tidypics in one batch it would be best to set post_max_size to about 64M (to allow for some overhead).

In any case, the Imagick php extension is better than the GD extension with much lower memory requirements (Elgg core supports the Imagick extension only since Elgg 3). With Tidypics I recomment the Image Magick command line tools that have also low memory requirements and I believe give the best image quality for the thumbnails.