How to get contact pictures off iPhone

Apple does not support what you want to do. You can request it:
http://apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

But this guy has a program that digs into the iPhone backup file and can bring out stuff:
http://homepage.mac.com/vaughn/msync/

You might see if his program (third-party, use at your own risk) knows how to retrieve the photo stored with the contact. I can't quite tell from the webpage. You are not the first person to request this, so there is a small market for it.

There might be other third-party programs as well, that could help.

(I am assuming the backup file stores the contact photo, though really, I haven't tested that myself.)

I'm not wrong in regards to such a photo is not saved in your iPhone's Camera Roll regardless if the photo captured via the contact's app is saved as full resolution, which is the only location where photos captured by your iPhone can be imported by your computer.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html

If you capture and assign a photo from the contact editor with the iPhone, the photo isn't saved anywhere else or can be used anywhere else.

You need to capture the photo from the Camera application, which saves the captured photo in the iPhone's Camera Roll and where you can assign the photo as a wallpaper, email the photo, assign to a contact, send to MobileMe if you have a MM account, or import by your computer as with all other photos available in your iPhone's Camera Roll.

There is nothing to fix.

If want to save a photo on your iPhone full resolution as provided when capturing the photo, use the Camera app. You can assign such a photo to a contact and import the photo by your computer along with all other photos captured by using the Camera app and which are stored in your iPhone's Camera Roll. A photo captured from within the Address Book app is not stored in your iPhone's Camera Roll. It is for assigning the photo captured to a contact only at a reduced resolution. When syncing with Outlook or the Address Book on a Mac, the reduced resolution photo is transfered with the contact info.

Capture all photos with the Camera app only if you want a full resolution copy for import by your computer.

I have no clue, but don't think resolution is all that crucial.

Even a low-res picture can help preserve an important memory. Or something that makes a good phone contact picture may likely also make a good avatar for flickr, twitter, etc, and it would not need to be full resolution for such purposes.

Nothing taken with the iPhone is all that high-res anyhow. IIRC, pix assigned on the phone show up full-screen, so it's probably not as low-res as the teeny photo assigned on the desktop and transferred via sync.

Incidentally, google turned up this method of retrieval, using the Mac:

If you click "edit" on the contact's entry in Address Book and then double click inside their picture, it will appear as a somewhat bigger version, which you can copy with command-C. But it's a far cry from full-resolution.

http://forums.macnn.com/103/ipod-iphone-and-apple-tv/341591/iphone-contact-photo s-how-to-extract/

I can't test it, though, as I don't sync contacts, and really have no clue whether the iPhone sync contact pictures to Outlook on Windows, which I assume the OP uses.

If you can recover or extract a contact's photo from the iPhone's backup, I don't believe it will be full resolution.

Daiya wrote:
, and really have no clue whether the iPhone sync contact pictures to Outlook on Windows, which I assume the OP uses.

it does.