imessage contacts not displaying on mac

I wanted to create this thread to share the permanent solution I found to a long-standing problem I've had that I have seen other people experience through old comment threads.

I previously had the issue of my contacts (name, photo) not displaying in imessage on my macbook air. It was strange, because some contacts would display, but most would not. These contacts showed up fine on my phone with imessage. I spent the past hour trying to figure out a solution and was successful.

In Message settings on my phone, I have it set up to send and receive messages from both my phone number and a particular email address (the email associated with my icloud ID). On my phone, I went to Contacts, then Settings (in contacts) and was able to see that I have several "accounts" including iCloud, but also the email associated with my icloud as its own account. Here in Contact Settings you can also see what is established as your "Default Account".

I made the email account my default account instead of icloud (this step may not be necessary), but then went to my macbook and in contacts I had to add this email as an "Account". These steps imported all of my contacts and now my messages on both my computer and macbook are synced with full names and information. I believe that somehow when creating new contacts on my iphone (since the different accounts merge) there is no way to choose which account a new contact is being associated with/saved to, and they were somehow all linking to this particular email (instead of my iCloud "account").

This probably sounds incredibly confusing, but I hope this is helpful to some.