ActiveSync and Contact Photos (5.0.7) with iPhone 3G/Firmware 2.0

[Jason Hung]

Any update on this? I have been using MobileMe as a quickfix for the interim.

[jjzhuang]

so far we can't reproduce this issue. photos seem to work just fine.

when were the photos first added to the contacts with this problem. do you remember the server version at that time?

and are new photos all OK?

[BarefootPanda]

I have the same issue. The photos only work if they are added IN the web interface. The sync connector doesn't seem to work. I have reset my sync data and played around with it. I have disabled Contact active-syncing because of this.

[knabe]

Originally Posted by BarefootPanda

I have the same issue. The photos only work if they are added IN the web interface. The sync connector doesn't seem to work. I have reset my sync data and played around with it. I have disabled Contact active-syncing because of this.

I am experiencing the same issue here. In fact I can't even take a picture on my iPhone and add it to a contact.

[knabe]

I have added photos to the web interface, and the phone itself. I can't get photos to show up anywhere. I am running 5.0.9. Has Zimbra been able to duplicate the issue?

[GuyWithAQuestion]

I have a work around that seems to work (didn't see it posted yet), but it does take a little extra effort to do.

Basically, the work around is to assign the pictures on the iPhone as opposed to a computer, and then sync it up.

If you already have a bunch of contact pictures you want to keep, that's fine. The easiest way is to grab the JPEG files from your address book directory image storage area:
<user name>/Library/Application Support/Address Book/Images/
(sort them on kind and copy only the jpeg files).
Paste the in a folder that you can easily find (I suppose you could just use the original directory that they are in... but i'm not sure if iTunes will think the other files without extensions are image files as well, so I did it this way to avoid the headache).
In iTunes, when your phone is plugged in and ready to sync, go to the photo tab of your iPhone and choose to sync photos from the folder where you saved your images. Once done syncing, you will now have all the photos you had in your address book on your phone.

It's now a matter of clicking on each photo and assigning each one to a contact. A little tedious if you have a lot, but it was worth it to me.

The thing to keep in mind is that if you adjust the photo on your computer and then do an Active Sync, the photo on your phone will be wiped out (you can adjust it on your phone as much as you want and your computer will update just fine though). It appears that if you adjust any other field (i.e. birthdate) on the computer and do another sync, the field on your phone will update and the picture will remain untouched.

What REALLY pleases me about this whole Zimbra syncing (vs. MobileMe) is that I can assign a ring tone to a contact, and even after doing an over the air sync it remains what I set it to. Currently with MobileMe this doesn't work too well (even when you do a hard line sync on your computer it sometimes messes it up). Good job to Zimbra for getting this part right when Apple couldn't!

Lastly, in my Address Book I have numerous groups, but they don't seem to sync up at all over the air. Has this been addressed in another thread?

[GuyWithAQuestion]

I thought this was sort of interesting, so I'll pass this along as well.

I ended up redoing my iTunes (in fact, my whole computer) this past weekend and started from scratch.
Anyway, new iTunes means my iPhone and iPods will need to be resynced with a new library. So I had everything prepared (copied over the ********* and synced all my contact images... figuring I would have to reassign them all once I set up Zimbra to sync the contacts). The interesting thing is that once I did it... all of the contact pictures were reimported and assigned correctly without me having to do anything. Nice.
I tested it to see if they had fixed the underlying problem but they haven't (I just tried assigning someone's picture to a contact on my computer... but the picture didn't transfer to the phone). So initially, it seems that all contact pictures must be assigned from the phone... but once they are done there they can be reimported.
The ********* had to be redone.

Looks like the problem is still "assigned", though, so I'm not sure if anything was done recently to improve this or not:

Bug 29902 &ndash; Address book photo doesn't sync via iPhone 2 ActiveSync

[knabe]

I did find that if you add the photo to the contact via the Zimbra web interface that it then goes to the iPhone and the Addressbook on the Mac.

[nitrodesk]

Just wanted to inform you.. when handling the activesync sync response for a contact change, i see that the Picture element is missing from the response. In Exchange 2003 and 2007 servers, every contact change/add contains the Base64 encoded picture in the Picture element under the contacts application data..

This same problem hence appears even in TouchDown on the Android plaform.

regards
-Nitro