Contacts (People) HTC Evo

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I’ve had an HTC Evo since September 2010. One thing I struggled with understanding was why the pictures for contacts didn’t stay how I had made them.

I used to have a Palm Pre. I had Google Contacts, had worked on Google on my laptop to make my contacts how I wanted. I loaded pictures there.

On my Evo, I just had to add a few accounts to it when it was brand new and voila! All my stuff was on my phone in short order. But the thing is, PEOPLE was a bit confusing, even coming from the Palm Pre which had LAYERED Contacts.

So, with how it works, it’s great, have a bunch of contacts here and there and somewhere else, they can all be pulled into your phone and then you can put the right ones together to make a set of from 1 contacts different contact profiles.

In the HTC Evo it’s actually more clear when understood from the un-linked position of things. When no contacts are linked to any other contacts there can be multiple entries for one person. For instance, an “on your phone” contact, a “google” contact, a “flickr” contact, etc.

Each “contact” has information associated with it, including a “picture”. For Google it’s whatever is on Google for that contact. For Flickr it’s whatever is that person’s avatar on Flickr. So then … on the phone … it’s whatever picture is associated with that contact on your phone.

In order to have a nice crisp contact picture showing when you call that contact or when they call you … it’s best to have the phone contact picture. (This is how you do it for any contact, but particularly a topic of usefulness for any Google Contact user.) If you don’t have original images on your phone tied to a phone contact, then the other pictures the linked contact uses are degraded images from websites. The are pixelated and blurry, horrible monstrous things. They look nice at first, but then when your phone syncs with those services, you see a degraded picture next time, sometimes swapped from Google to Flickr or something too. Weird. Anyhow, continue on to solve it.

1. For each contact that you have a specific image you want to use for said contact, un-link everything from their linked profile. (open contact, at the top on the right touch “Linked” to get to the screen to edit those settings. Touch the green linked line to “unlink”. Then touch “done”.

2. Go to the PEOPLE list.

2. Open the “phone contact” –only have their NAME entered and for the picture pick the one you want, crop as desired, and save it, save the contact. If you don’t have a “phone contact” entry, then make a new one exactly as detailed. (I suppose you could have other info in there, this is the same (you have to edit an existing PHONE contact using “menu”)

3. Then open a related contact and touch the green “Linked” symbol or the gray “not linked” symbol. Choose the different contacts to link, linking the PHONE contact last.

The resulting Linked Contact won’t automatically use the right picture. Once linked, only 1 contact shows in your PEOPLE list. They are “layered” or “linked” contacts, however you wish to think of it. Choose the “PHONE” contact when you touch the picture in the “LINKED” screen. Then you have the right picture, the one ON YOUR PHONE associated with the linked contact. No icky Google, Flickr or other degraded or unwanted image will be used.

Of course you may not HAVE to ‘unlink’ everything to do this. Just know you have to UNLINK the Phone contact to be able to be sure you pick the picture & it’s is used permanently.

My idea for a new Evo owner would be, open PEOPLE & don’t link anything until you make phone contacts for whom you want better pictures connected to your contacts, make a PHONE contact with their name and PHOTO. Let the other info be filled in with Google or whatever else.

In my case I use Retro Camera app for a lot of pictures. I make a PHONE contact, choose a photo from my gallery, Crop it so that it looks right, it crops square, Retro Camera photos are square, so it’s really easy to get the right look using one. I mean, it’s not just the person or whatever, it’s styling as well. At any rate, if it’s what you want, it looks great to you, that’s all that you’ll want.

Try the above methodology, refine it however you can, understanding that I haven’t step-by-step gone through every jot and tittle of information about this. It’s more an idea with basic steps and understanding of what one needs to do to accomplish happy thoughts about the phone when making and receiving calls.




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