Skype allows you to change the picture that's displayed as your avatar, the (sometimes) unfortunate side effect is it keeps all of the previous pictures you used in its 'Recents' tab. I never really liked this kind of functionality, but do admit it can come in useful sometimes. In the case of Facebook you can delete the recent profile photos, but in Skype, at least on OS X there is no way to remove these recent pictures within the app itself. However, there is a more complicated way to remove them if you're willing to put a few minutes of your time into it.

To show what I'm talking about...when you click on your profile picture in Skype and click Change Picture, a dialog box comes up that shows you a number of options. Here you can take a new photo using your computer's camera, select a default picture or pick from the recent pictures list. As you can see in my case, there are bunch of recent pictures. Some appear to be from other users who logged into Skype on my laptop at some point or another.


So after quite a lot of searching around, I was able to find the location where these pictures are stored and it's not in a very obvious spot. The images are found in the directory shown below. You can get to it by going to Finder, then clicking the Go menu and then selecting Go to Folder... and typing in the directory and selecting OK.




This directory will have the picture as well as a thumbnail version of that picture. It will also have a file called Recents.plist.


It is not enough to just delete the picture(s) you do not want, you also have to delete their corresponding entries in this plist file. Luckily this is a plain text file and can be edited with any text editor. Simply get the file name of the picture you want to delete, find it in the plist file and delete the entire <dict> entry that encompasses that picture, as shown below.


After you're done removing all the unwanted pictures, save the plist file, quit and restart Skype. The offending images will not be present any longer. I got a little more creative with mine, but did get rid of the pictures I didn't want to keep coming up.


-i