[Implemented] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

This is the discussion thread of this Brainstorm proposal: Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

Gravatar is popular service to host avatar to allow to sync with other platforms. To access their API you can implement in plugin for your software. They have tons reference implementations and reference implementations in tons of languages. (I've never the platform btw.)

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

For grabbing contacts from Facebook I am experimenting with telepathy-gruschler right now:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~hasselm...athy-gruschler

Still Facebook can hardly be used to automatically annotate contacts with Avatars: The API is too closed. For instance it doesn't export any reliable information like email addresses or phone numbers for privacy reasons.

Gravatar support? Yes, this would make sense. It's an easy to use service.

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

I would hope we could eventually have avatars distinct per Contact group, with a default master avatar. I would not want my ugly rat icon displayed to business contacts. ;)

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

Didn't know about this telepathy plugin. Interesting.

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

I'd argue you can use the Facebook API to get avatars, because I already do in Hermes. The point is that most people probably don't have three "Dave Smith"s as Facebook friends and in their Contacts.

Hermes currently does:

• Facebook
• Twitter

Future possibilities:

• Google Contacts (Mail for Exchange doesn't retrieve images, I'm told)
• gravatar.com
• maemo.org ;-)

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

That's probably true, but my family and my wife's family each have their own set of "favorite" names, used again and again. I've resorted to including middle initials, nicknames, and other tie breakers in the "first name" fields for a number of my contacts to stop Hermes from assigning every person with a particular name the same avatar and birthday.

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

There are common first names in every language, such as 'John', 'Avi', 'Mohammed'. Same for last name. Collisions are bound to occur.

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

Have you raised a bug about not using the same social network friend more than once? ;-)

Re: [Under consideration] Automatically grab avatars from social services for Contacts app
 

Is this actually a problem? I don't know anyone with the same first name and last name combination, and I don't know if I'm abnormal in that.