Is anybody running contact Pics?

[Guest chris9181]

I thought I would and take advantage of the nice high quality screen. Dissappointed though as the pics on the Chompsms pop up dont seem particularly clear.

Is there a nack of setting a pic, i.e. do it by taking the photo with the SF camera, or upload a pic to google contacts and then syncing (although I dont think Google let you upload a high pixel pic). or any other method?

Any suggestions greatfully received as I would like to make the most of this screen.

Cheers

[Guest asim18]

The built in image scaling may be deteriorating your photos. I used Photoshop to process and downscale my contact photos and they look tack sharp on the phone screen.

[Guest flash2004]

The built in image scaling may be deteriorating your photos. I used Photoshop to process and downscale my contact photos and they look tack sharp on the phone screen.

What size do they need to be scaled to ?

[Guest asim18]

What size do they need to be scaled to ?

I've done mine at 200x200px. Seemed like a reasonable resolution.

Remember, android doesn't let you control the downscaling. Yes it'll crop your photo and resize it and it'll work fine, but there's much more to image resizing. If you want professional results you will need to edit your photographs externally.

Edited October 14, 2010 by asim18

[Guest flash2004]

I've done mine at 200x200px. Seemed like a reasonable resolution.

Remember, android doesn't let you control the downscaling. Yes it'll crop your photo and resize it and it'll work fine, but there's much more to image resizing. If you want professional results you will need to edit your photographs externally.

Wow.. this worked like a charm. Thank you very much !

[Guest chris9181]

The built in image scaling may be deteriorating your photos. I used Photoshop to process and downscale my contact photos and they look tack sharp on the phone screen.

Thanks very much for your help, it’s good to know something can be done to improve image quality.

Speaking as a bit of a techno idiot, could you please give some instructions as to what I need to do, i.e. what/where is the photo software? Do I start with the photos on my pc or phone?

Many thanks

Chris

[Guest flash2004]

Here is what I did.

Open photoshop CS5, open the photo, set the crop dimensions to 200 px by 200 px. Select the area you want to appear as your contact pic, and crop. Then save as a new image (jpeg) on the desktop. Transfer this file to your SD card.

Then open the contact on your phone, edit the contact, click the picture and select change picture. Select gallery and open the picture which you copied on your SD card. Click save and voila ! done !

Crystal clear pics on your contacts :)

[Guest flash2004]

BTW, I did this on a Macbookpro. Pre-requisites are photoshop and your picture file for this to work :)

[Guest chris9181]

BTW, I did this on a Macbookpro. Pre-requisites are photoshop and your picture file for this to work :)

m'mmm shame I havent got photoshop, and it looks expensive. Any free software I can do this please?

[Guest GraviticVortex]

Any decent foto editing software can do cropping.

Out of free ones Faststone and Picasa should be good enough.

Also legendary Irfanview.

I have read elswhere though that main issue is gmail contact sync.

People complain that gmail contacts crops contact pics to 96x96 resulting streched/blurry image on phone.

Is this true?

[Guest chris9181]

I've done mine at 200x200px. Seemed like a reasonable resolution.

Remember, android doesn't let you control the downscaling. Yes it'll crop your photo and resize it and it'll work fine, but there's much more to image resizing. If you want professional results you will need to edit your photographs externally.

How did you arrive at 200x200 px? trial and error or is tghere another reason?

Cheers

[Guest oh!dougal]

Here is what I did.

Open photoshop CS5, open the photo, set the crop dimensions to 200 px by 200 px. Select the area you want to appear as your contact pic, and crop. Then save as a new image ...

Technically and artistically, wouldn't it be better to begin by cropping the image to the composition that you want?

And then after that, to resize your (cropped) image to make it 200 x 200 pixels. And then save it.

If you want to select a square (square, not merely rectangular) area (on Mac at least) hold down the shift key when you are making your rectangular selection 'marquee' -- its been that way since MacPaint in 1984.

200x200 is somewhere close -- comparing the image displayed with the 480 pixels width of the SF screen.

If Google are actually using 96x96 elsewhere, perhaps 192x192 (ie 4x the pixel count) might be the 'native' size - requiring no resizing by the phone. I wonder if the true size would be in some developer documentation?

[Guest oh!dougal]

How did you arrive at 200x200 px? trial and error or is tghere another reason?

...

200x200 is somewhere close -- comparing the image displayed with the 480 pixels width of the SF screen.

If Google are actually using 96x96 elsewhere, perhaps 192x192 (ie 4x the pixel count) might be the 'native' size - requiring no resizing by the phone. I wonder if the true size would be in some developer documentation?

The active bit of the screen is damn close to 4.5 cm, 45 mm.

480 pixels so roughly 10 pixels/mm ... (wow, I thought) comes out at 10.667 for calculation

The caller picture/avatar shows at about 18 mm square.

And, guess what ... that calculates as 192 pixels!

So ... my suggestion is that the optimal picture size is likely to be 192 pixels square.

Edited October 19, 2010 by oh!dougal