Find friends shows the email address for the people I am following and not hteir name and picture. How can I change it

When you upgraded to iOS 6, Find My Friends asked you to use to access your address book contacts. You probably chose "NO" (like I did). Without the access, it can't associate the names. Close "Find My Friends." Go to Settings>General>Reset>Reset Location and Privacy> and then press the Default Setings Bar. Reopen Find My Friends and the app should ask you again if it can use your contacts. Choose "Allow" and your names in your address book will reappear where the email addresses were. Of course a whole bunch of other apps are going to ask you for permissions all over again but at least you don't have to look at cryptic email names in Find My Friends.

roncoe's post helped me get on the right track, however, I had to do slightly different steps.

E.g. Find Friends shows "jsmith@yahoo..co instead of "Jane Smith" and jdoegmail.com instead of "John Doe".

Force quit Find Friends.

Go into contacts and delete the email address for Jane Smith.

Save changes.

Edit Jane Smith to add back her email address.

Save changes.

Re-launch Find Friends.

All of my "friends" were then re-linked to contacts even though I just added/deleted the email address for one of them. Its like the change forced Find Friends to scan contacts again.

Incidentally, I experienced this issue when I restored my iPhone from a backup.

Hope that this helps.

The app should use the data of your contacts (in your address book). Have you checked if the email addresses are also stored in your address book? If everything is right, but the names and pictures are not available then try to delete the app and install it again.

I too had been experiencing this problem. I decided to spend some real time troubleshooting it over the Christmas break. I do realize that there has already been a solution posted to one variety of this problem. I've found another possible cause and thought it would be useful to share with this community.

Here is what I've found:

The root of my version of this problem seems to stem from the fact that my iPhone is integrated with the messaging system at my place of work--Exchange/Outlook. This integration provides a feature that will populate a suggested contacts folder with the e-mail addresses of the people that you frequently send e-mail messages to. Even though that folder is a child of the Exchange messaging conduit on the phone it appears to have some precedence system wide. I confirmed that my friends whose entries were giving me trouble in FmF had e-mail addresses in the suggested contacts folder. Here is what I did to resolve the problem:

1. Delete the addresses from the suggested contacts folder

2. In the contacts app, choose to hide all groups

3. Force quite FmF if it is running

4. Relaunch FmF

After these steps FmF finds the correct contact entry in the Contacts app and does the right thing. I'm even able to reenable the display of groups in the contact app and FmF continues to work as expected.

Hope this is helpful.

The fix might be as simple as going to Settings => Privacy => Contacts and then check if Find Friends is allowed access to your Contacts.