Messages for Mac: No profile picture in chat box

Just to bump this up, and provide a solution for 2017. If you are in your contact/address book on a Mac. Find YOUR address card. Once it is open, go up to the menu, choose "Card". Choose the submenu: Make This My Card. If your card has a photo, it will now appear in your Messages stream, AFTER your restart Message.

Best,

Stephen

Cary, NC

In the conversation area above where you have annotated, “No Picture(s),” just do a right mouse button (trackpad: two-finger tap) and from the menu, choose Show Names and Pictures.

Optionally, if you want to animate buddy pictures, this can be enabled in Messages > Preferences > General.

Images will only replace the grey picture in iMessage Messages panel when they are assigned to existing Contacts. That includes yourself.

Is there anything unique about your Contact picture file format or size that differs from the other Contact images?

In messages, open up Window / Buddies. In the Buddies window you should be able to change your picture there by dragging the picture you want or clicking on the empty picture and selecting something from there.

Given the way messages works within your mac, it's important to note it functions different with regards to contact card images, their syncing, and how that all relates back to iCloud.

For example, when I change my individual contact card in contacts on either my Mac, iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone, iCloud communicates that to all my respective devices and WILL change the contact images displayed beside the speech bubble. (This is of course presuming your iCloud account is the same across said devices)

The reason you are having troubles, is that you are technically not using iMessage on a Mac. You're using 'Messages', which will work seamlessly in syncing iMessage conversations started elsewhere, but is itself a messaging service like AIM, MSN messenger, etc.

The short answer to the question "How do I get my account picture to appear next to my messages on my Mac?" is after right-clicking the grey silouette that will soon be your image (secondary click, control-click, or click with two fingers using the trackpad) click on 'Messages->Change My Picture' on the menu bar and select your photo from there. You can also import this from iPhoto. If necessary, quit and re-launch Messages.

After experiencing the same issue on my computer (15" MBP Retina) I was able to remedy the issue with these steps. Hopefully that helps.

If only it were that simple. My image shows on ALL devices..iphone, iPad, iMac..... bar the new macbook air im using right now. Even if I send a message to myself, my image ONLY appears on the receivers side, not the senders side.

And be darned if I can see whats different on this device to every other.

Ohh, and yes...my Contact card is set as Me. Very perplexing.

Was this ever figured out? I also just see the default place holder image in Messages on my iMac for all of my outgoing messages. As shown above, if I send a message to myself, I do see my photo correctly on the left but my sent message on the right just shows the default blank person image.

My OCD is kicking in so I hope this can be finxed. LOL!!!! 🙂

Yep..and sooooo simple in the end. This was happening just on my one device, though on one other I had a different pic of myself showing up. Both are related problems.

The image you use as a user on the mac. On one I had just a default image, which gave the blank in messages, on another, my user image was an old on. So despite setting my face in contacts, it was using the image from my user profile when I logged in.

So, blank means you havent set a picture for your User ID profile.

I'm really glad that you figured this out.

However, please forgive me as I am new to the Mac having only had mine now for about a week.

I thought I had profile pictures added everywhere I could add them. Can you provide step by step how to get to the specific spot where I have to update my picture to get it to show in the chat?

Thanks agian for your help with this! I really appreciate it. I can't wait until I can get it fixed. 🙂