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Contact and Userid Images Disappearing

So I have seen some have experienced this issue already with no solution. I am seeing contact images disappear with a random string being added at the end of phone numbers or in the country field that starts with X-IMAGEHASH or X-ABADR. It also changes any numbers marked as "Mobile" to "Phone". It messes up using Siri to make calls or just trying to call someone with an impacted record because often it adds the string to the end of their number. I should add this can occur even if there is no image associated with the contact but interestingly it seems to be the same contacts every time despite there being no real commonality between them. A restore of contacts back to a time before this began happening had no impact. The next day the same thing occurred. To make things even more complicated my Userid picture on the Mac which references Photos also disappears at the same time. It seems to have something to do with anything that references Photos on the iCloud for the most part but why I could not tell you. Nothing (no third party apps) has access to my contacts or photos. It happens on all devices - iPad, iPhone, Mac M1 Max, Watch.

Posted on Jul 12, 2022 3:06 PM

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119 replies

Sep 1, 2022 12:28 AM in response to scott.w.uhl

Apple have me jumping through relentless hoops constantly creating contacts to see if they will be corrupted overnight after dumping a plethora of diagnostic data. Its becoming somewhat annoying. The current thing they want is under Privacy on my phone to disconnect anything that has access to contacts for 24 hours and AGAIN create test contacts with pictures. To date every time we do this they end up corrupted. I did manage to prove on thing though. Each X-IMAGE HAS string relates to a particular pic in Photos. If you create 4 contacts - 3 with different pics and 1 with the same the 2 that end up the same with have the same string. I still see this as an iCloud sync issue but try convincing Apple. I have told them this is the last test I do for them and then I expect some resolutions.

Sep 1, 2022 12:14 PM in response to scott.w.uhl

The bit I don't get is why does it only happen 24-48 hours later and not immediately if its a pure sync issue because syncing is a constant. Something happens once a day overnight that stuffs it up. Yesterday I disabled (under privacy) anything accessing contacts on my devices which included Signal, Keeper and MS Teams and overnight none of the contacts have stuffed up yet. But it could still happen in the next 24 hours.

Sep 2, 2022 4:19 PM in response to scott.w.uhl

OK, 24 hrs on, fingers crossed, all iCloud/ MBP M1, Mini M1, iOS, messages, mail, contacts all are intact, have not lost an image yet (photo or icon) of the ±35 common contacts across those apps, after 24 hrs of automatic syncing via iCloud to all devices

PS MS Teams (deep) removed from Macs with AppCleaner, deleted from iOS and deleted iOS MS Outlook as well.


Could I still be smiling in another 24hrs? Fingers crossed

Sep 2, 2022 4:23 PM in response to pat-pegasusbay

Well for me its 48 hours with no issues - I have re-established the Signal ling to contacts yesterday, leaving MS Teams disconnected, and still no issues. The longest stretch for me without an issue. Lets give it another 24 hours and if so it may have something to do with MS Teams. I didn't deep removed it - just stopped it from accessing contacts via privacy settings.

Sep 3, 2022 1:38 PM in response to Netnemesis

Day 3 and still no contact issues - I will add one thing Apple also go me to do was create a new "me" contact too. I deleted the old one associated with "me" on the systems and created a new one. I noticed at that point whilst other contacts were still getting corrupted that one and its pic were not. It was after I did that that I removed an connections to MS Teams and I have yet to have an issue.

Sep 4, 2022 11:50 PM in response to Netnemesis

I had this same problem, but noticed that it only happened with contacts I had edited from my Mac (12.5.1), especially when adding a contact image. It would be fine throughout the day and suddenly mess up during the night. To fix this, I wrote two shortcuts (one to remove all contact images just to be sure, and another to remove X-tags from affected fields, available here). After this, I started adding contact images from my iPhone (15.6.1), and 72 hours later everything still seems fine.

Sep 5, 2022 1:23 AM in response to TheFJ97

Yeah we all agree it works fine if you remove all contact images - but we shouldn't need to do that. I have been going over 4 days since I created a new "me" contact for myself and disconnected MS Teams from being able to access contacts on my IOS devices and since then no issues. Apple L2 support also tell me they have seen no corruption since to my data and if you guys confirm the same it may well be MS Teams is the culprit.

Sep 5, 2022 3:06 AM in response to Netnemesis

3 days without any loss of images on either Macs or iOS Mail/Messages etc., also created a new 'Me' contact as suggested

Teams removed across all devices

growing evidence the Cloud Sync corruption is linked to MS Teams?


at some point I will have to reinstall Teams (for my job) - anybody running Teams, w/o access to Contacts in Privacy, and no longer having photo/icon deletions/field corruptions (with X-mash etc)?

Or should one just wait for Ventura hoping that that issues is solved in the new OS?

Contact and Userid Images Disappearing

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