Outlook Contact Photos
April 14, 2008 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
Since I’ve been playing with Xobni more one question I’ve come across is why doesn’t Xobni use Outlook’s own contact photo information?
That was somewhat of a rhetorical question because I didn’t really need an answer and it wasn’t worth completely pursuing for an answer.
What it did do though was make me wonder where Outlook keeps it’s contact photo information? I’m curious because I love that my phone displays the contact photo on CallerID when that person calls me. It makes it really easy to see who’s calling you with a quick glance at your phone if you’re in a meeting or something.
For working with the photos themselves I put them in “My Pictures” but I don’t necessarily want to keep all of those sitting in there. Can I delete them? Should I bury them somewhere in the file system and just remember where they are?
I couldn’t find any information about the location of this stored information on the Internet. Anybody know? Oddly enough the other information I couldn’t find in the help section is the default minimum maximum size of the image for processing.
It’s a series of questions now though, because then I started wondering what it would take (or why it didn’t already) for the .vcf card attachments to include a photo of the contact person. What would be even cooler is if there was an option for you to include people’s avatars from things like twitter.
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 provides an integrated solution for managing your time and information, connecting across boundaries, and remaining in control of the information that reaches you. Office Outlook 2007 delivers innovations you can use to quickly search your communications, organize your work, and better share your information with others — all from one place.
I believe all that was kind of obvious John, or were you just looking to pimp your own URL? =)
According to Outlook help, the image are auto sized to 90×90 pixels. I have been making PNG files at that size and 96 dpi, the results are perfect. As for where the data is stored, Outlook keeps its own contact database on top of the windows address book. Actually your entire mailbox is stored in a PST file. This file is usually located at [UserFolder]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst
Thanks for that information Jared. So the image files are stored within the PST itself. I just wanted to make sure so that if I moved the files it didn’t make the images disappear from my contacts.