Avatars

Fellow users, one thing I’ve found that I don’t like is that uploading an avatar for your user name in WordPress is not quite as easy.  Rather, it isn’t hard, but it appears that WordPress tries to force you to create a separate WordPress log in for “Gravatar” in order to be given an avatar.  I’m looking around to see what alternatives exist, and if any of you know of any, please let me know.  Edit:  it appears you can do an internal avatar without having to go through Gratar.