Help Poor Contact Picture Quality for Caller ID

[austink]

I don't understand why the photos for my contacts look so blurry, pixelated and bad when my phone rings.

I take a high res picture and crop that picture on the phone, and it looks fine when it is a 1/4inch thumbnail, but when they call you, it is like the photo is just stretched to the bigger size. Is there a reason that the phone doesn't have it in the native resolution?

At first I thought it was because most of my photos were pulled down from Facebook, but even if I change it to a photos stored on my phone, it looks bad when the person calls.

Does anyone else have this issue?

 

[JoeKC]

I don't understand why the photos for my contacts look so blurry, pixelated and bad when my phone rings.

I take a high res picture and crop that picture on the phone, and it looks fine when it is a 1/4inch thumbnail, but when they call you, it is like the photo is just stretched to the bigger size. Is there a reason that the phone doesn't have it in the native resolution?

At first I thought it was because most of my photos were pulled down from Facebook, but even if I change it to a photos stored on my phone, it looks bad when the person calls.

Does anyone else have this issue?

I'll guess your problem is you've used the phone to crop the picture. It looks fine at the small size, but since you're making a 100% crop on the phone, anything that enlarges it will give you jaggies and a generally unsatisfactory result. Try editing your pictures on your computer and transferring them over. Keep your size to about 3" minimum (on the sides, not the diagonal) and you'll most likely see better results.

Let me know how this comes out.

 

[ChrisK15]

Yes, I have the same issue. It's not anybody's fault, it's the phone that seems to upscale the small contact list photos to a larger size, not actually displaying the larger image.

 

[zachd]

I encounter the same problem from my synced facebook friends, drives me CRAZY. Hopefully a fix in the update coming up.

 

[Reniassance_Man]

I was gonna post this right now, but I saw that a thread already existed.

I can't stand this aspect of the phone. I adore my droid and its gorgeous screen, but that feeling is always shattered when I get a phone call and have to look at a horribly enlarged image. It's a shame that the cropping feature of the phone is so poorly implemented that it can only crop as a tiny thumbnail image and not compensate for the larger caller ID photos.

I really hope that this gets fixed soon.

 

[baka]

this annoys the hell out of me so i posted it on code.google.com. its probably been posted before, but what the hell; maybe they'll fix it in the OTA.

Issue 5046 - android - droid caller id image quality - caller id images are very loq quality and pixelated - Project Hosting on Google Code

help get the issue resolved by starring it and posting your thoughts.

 

[oceanlight]

maybe what is happening is...

the contact list downsizes your pic and resaves it internally as a tiny pic. then the caller id pic pulls from the tiny contact list pic directly, and sizes that up. therefore, blurry.

dunno. just a guess.

 

[baka]

maybe what is happening is...

the contact list downsizes your pic and resaves it internally as a tiny pic. then the caller id pic pulls from the tiny contact list pic directly, and sizes that up. therefore, blurry.

dunno. just a guess.

It happens even when you take a picture with the phone camera and set it to the caller id. If set to 5mp, the image should be good quality. I think its something to do with how droid resizes it for the caller id.

and gg to me for not knowing how to spell "low"

 

[michaelk]

there's a thumbs directory on the sd card. I haven't looked in it- but maybe it pulls the thumbnail from there and blows it up?

 

[bruceo]

This is an issue with winmo phones and I also had it on the hero. On the touch pro I could make it so the contact pics wouldnt sync because it has something to do with synching to the cloud with stuff like google, ms myphone, dashwire. The image gets compressed when synched so it gets crappy on the phone.

The interesting thing is I noticed on my wifes eris all the photos are large and clear and they are synced to fb and the google cloud. Where on the droid they are small and look like ass... so htc i guess figured it out....

 

[ackeefe]

that's strange because the caller id pictures on my htc eris are terrible. it's bugged me for a while and i'm just getting around to look it up now. i've imported pictures from my computer and taken them with the camera, but the image quality is terrible when the caller id pic pops up. i have them cropped, but it looks extremely clear when you are actually cropping it. why is the caller id pic so terrible.

 

[Kemm1542]

When I purchased my phone about 1 month ago, I did not have this problem. Now all of a sudden I do?? VERY ANNOYING!!!!

 

[ackeefe]

has anyone found a solution for this? the caller id pictures are extremely poor quality

 

[MorningThief581]

Yup. So bad. I registered here just to add my name to the list of people annoyed with the crappy pixelated contact images displayed when a call comes in. Anyone made progress with a workaround?

 

[MorningThief581]

Disclaimer: This refers to the Hero, which suffers from the same problem. Hopefully this solution works on the Droid too.

I was just playing around with this for a while, and I think I know what's going on. More importantly, I have a fix, albeit an annoying one. bruceo touched on it with his reference to the cloud and disabling sync. Google Contacts images are natively 96x96. Enlarged contact photos on the Hero (when a call is inbound/outbound) look to be roughly 210x210.

I put a 320x480 image on my card (Hero's native res) and made that a 210x210 contact image using the default crop square on the phone. It looked fine at first, but 5 minutes later it looked horrible.

I suspect Google Contacts is syncing with the phone, but at the same time it's downscaling the photo to fit within the 96x96 Google Contacts constraint. The next time your phone and Google Contacts communicate, the filesizes don't match, so voila... latest timestamp wins and your phone pulls the new image from Google Contacts. Now your contacts list (on the phone) is referencing a 96x96 image for a 210x210 display... and the end result is ugly.

If you disable syncing between your phone and Google Contacts (Settings>Data Synchronization>Google>Contacts - uncheck), the image will NOT be overwritten. Of course the downside is you will need to make any future changes in both locations. But hey, at least your pictures won't look horrible.

 

[radian]

Here's the workaround for HTC Desire (and probably for other devices with Sense UI):

You should create additional contact and save it in phone memory. Contact info can be empty and it's not important what name you'll choose.
Then you should add a photo for this contact.

Next step is to create a link in People between this new contact and that one stored in Gmail account. By pressing Menu key during link creation you have access to options to choose name and photo for this "linked contact". You should choose photo from "Phone".

The result is you have high quality photo in your caller ID!
Also, you have duplicate contacts: one from Google account (but it's still synchronized!! , second from your phone internal memory. But it's not a problem - you won't see those duplicates as long as they're linked.

 

[jonuthun]

radian thank you!! That was driving me crazy but your workaround fixed the problem!

 

[rebelkc]

Thanks for this ...... has been driving me mad too but surely it should be fixed rather than a workaround?

It more of an annoyance than a major issue but it seems to be bugging a hell of a lot of folk !!!

 

[neggie]

agree that is why i have not put photos on contacts when i do i crop them right then i go make an outgoing call and the picture is all blurry or sometimes pixelated. Kinda tired of searching for fix for last 4 days so i decided to not to have contact photos. hopefully 2.2 will fix this issue

 

[makfi78]

Here's the workaround for HTC Desire (and probably for other devices with Sense UI):

You should create additional contact and save it in phone memory. Contact info can be empty and it's not important what name you'll choose.
Then you should add a photo for this contact.

Next step is to create a link in People between this new contact and that one stored in Gmail account. By pressing Menu key during link creation you have access to options to choose name and photo for this "linked contact". You should choose photo from "Phone".

The result is you have high quality photo in your caller ID!
Also, you have duplicate contacts: one from Google account (but it's still synchronized!! , second from your phone internal memory. But it's not a problem - you won't see those duplicates as long as they're linked.

Thanks mate !!

All you need to do is edit your contact and first edit google contact and delete photo then edit phone contact and add new photo.

Very simple but how long i was waiting for this...

Thanks again,you should get a medal

 

[rmtoth]

Thanks mate !!

All you need to do is edit your contact and first edit google contact and delete photo then edit phone contact and add new photo.

Very simple but how long i was waiting for this...

Thanks again,you should get a medal

You don't need to delete the Google photo. Add the contact picture to the phone contact, and then in the contact linking menu you'll notice there's a dropdown arrow for the linked contact picture. You can choose to use the Google or Phone picture from there.

 

[danjaq]

Hi,

The caller id photos I've assigned to the contacts on my HTC Legend also look stretched and blurry during an incoming call etc - - - just as others have described here and many other places.

The difference with my issue is that my contacts on my HTC Legend are saved to the Phone memory, they're not Google contacts and don't sync with my Gmail account.

Can anyone shed any light on to this one?!

Thanks!

You don't need to delete the Google photo. Add the contact picture to the phone contact, and then in the contact linking menu you'll notice there's a dropdown arrow for the linked contact picture. You can choose to use the Google or Phone picture from there.

 

[bjako]

You don't need to delete the Google photo. Add the contact picture to the phone contact, and then in the contact linking menu you'll notice there's a dropdown arrow for the linked contact picture. You can choose to use the Google or Phone picture from there.

It works and phone will show different pictures for both contacts.

But when I change picture in Outlook (I sync contacts with Exchange) then again I see poor quality Outlook picture when phone is ringing. I have to change picture again for linked contact to phone picture.

 

[smartrony2002]

Can anybody tell me how to make video cals from handsets not having a front camera....mine handset is samsung galaxy 3......please help it out
thanks

 

[Rons]

How about this!? I want to retrieve a pic I have used for a contact but I erased the original image.
Where would I find this?