iMessage on Mac Not Showing Contact Pics Synced From Facebook

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Level 2

210 points

iMessage on Mac Not Showing Contact Pics Synced From Facebook

I recently refreshed Contacts and deleted many of the custom images I had and instead allowed the system to sync my contact's Facebook profile photo. When using iMessage on my iPad, the correct pictures are showing up as their buddy icon but when using iMessage for Mac, I just get a gray box for anyone without a custom picture. I can "show contact card" and the picture is visible there but it's not showing up in iMessages. It worked fine before I deleted their custom pictures.

Any ideas or is it maybe a bug?

iMac 3.06 GHz 24, Mac OS X (10.7), 4 Gigs RAM

Posted on Sep 26, 2012 11:07 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 26, 2012 2:06 PM in response to Eric D.

HI,

Lets talk about how and where PIcs are in the first place.

With iChat (and to some extent Messages) you add a Buddy and the service they are with send you a Buddy pic

If you Add their "First Name, Last Name" info then a Address Book Card (Now Contacts) is Created and as a Default setting the Contacts (Formerly Address Book) takes the Buddy Pic from the App.

You can Enter the Contact app (Address Book) and change the Pic for that person.

You can then chose in Messages to highlight the Buddy and then do CMD + i together to see their info Card and chose which picture to Show in Messages/iChat

The Buddy Pics from whichever service are held in:-

~/Library/Caches/Messages/Pictures

The Address Book/Contacts pics are part of the meta data associated with the Card

I don't have a Facebook account and have never synced any pics from there.

However you may have enough info to progress from here

10:06 PM Wednesday; September 26, 2012

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.2)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and and iPad
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

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Answer 2

Eric D. Author

Level 2

210 points

Sep 26, 2012 7:23 PM in response to Ralph-Johns-UK

Ralph,

Thanks for your comments. I was able to fix the problem tonight but it wasn't easy. I've had my contacts through many OS X releases and have the feeling there was some corruption in my database. Some of my contacts had been assigned custom pictures through the old Address Book. When I tried to delete those pictures, they would just reappear. When you add FaceBook sync, if a Contact is missing a picture and the contact gets matched to Facebook, it will add their profile picture automatically (although I think technically it isn't saved to the record, just linked). Either way, until I could get the old pictures to delete, the Facebook pictures wouldn't show.

I'll spare you the gory details of how I made that happen but basically I exported my contacts, deleted them in Contacts and then reimported them. This worked but not without figuring out how to deal with iCloud and the syncing (it kept erasing them because I thought I didn't have any contacts).

Now that the Contacts have been rebuilt on my Mac and iCloud, all of the pictures in iMessage are showing correctly across devices.

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Answer 3

Sep 27, 2012 12:19 PM in response to Eric D.

Good to hear you have it sorted.

8:19 PM Thursday; September 27, 2012

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"

 iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Mountain Lion 10.8.2)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
 Couple of iPhones and and iPad
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

Reply

Answer 4

krisgo

Level 1

0 points

Mar 26, 2013 4:35 AM in response to Eric D.

Hi Eric!

I'm facing the same problem. Could you please go more into detail how you resolved this issue?

I have also deleted all my custom pictures, than turned on the facebook sync. Since then the profile pictures do not show up in iMessage.

Now reading your solution I have turned off the iCloud and the Facebook sync. Deleted the cache and the settings folders of AddressBook and Messages/Chat.

Turned on the sync again. No change.

For testing I have created a brand new account. Set up the iCloud and Facebook sync of my contacts and iMessage. Same situation.

So how have you exported and imported your contacts? Is there a chance, that by exporting the contacts you have also exported the Facebook profile picture into that vCard file and they became custom pictures after the import? It looks like iMessage only shows the custom pictures for whatever reason.

Thanks in advance!

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Answer 5

Eric D. Author

Level 2

210 points

Mar 26, 2013 5:09 PM in response to krisgo

Krisgo,

After I deleted the custom pictures, I went into System Preferences, Mail Contacts and Calendar, Facebook and then selected Update Profile Pictures. This seems to put the current Facebook profile picture in as the custom picture and iMessage should show the updated pictures. As long as you don't manually paste a picture in as a custom picture, updating the profile pictures will always replace it with the most recent Facebook one.

That said, this is clearly still a bug. If you look in Address Book, there can be multiple contact cards for your Facebook friends. One for iCloud and one for Facebook. If you open the Facebook card, you'll notice it already has the person's most current profile picture. What the current system is doing is forcing you to manually copy someone's Facebook picture into the custom picture field to get it to show. That's not the same behavior we see on the iPhone. On my phone, it defaults to showing the most current Facebook picture unless you override it by putting in a custom picture. In other words, exactly the opposite behavior.

Apple needs to get the behavior working the same for all devices. The iPad is different still.

Hope that helps.

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Answer 6

krisgo

Level 1

0 points

Mar 27, 2013 12:27 AM in response to Eric D.

Thank you Eric!

So you have updated the profile pictures. That explains why it works for you. This is actually what I want to prevent, that it looks for a profile picture for all of my contacts. I would like to see only the pictures of my friends.

Let's hope Apple fixes it soon!

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