Turning Off iOS 17 Contact Posters
In iOS 17, you can create a contact poster, which is essentially a combination of a profile picture and artwork that will represent you when calling other people on the phone, FaceTime, and other apps compatible with the CallKit framework.
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When a call comes in from one of my friends who’s created a contact poster on iOS 17, I like that I can see a little bit of their personality and taste in the poster they’ve chosen for themselves. Just like profile pictures before, you can choose to automatically share your poster with your contacts; you can either accept someone else’s poster or override it with your own poster for them.
Getting REALLY pissed at this new Apple behavior of names and photos for a contact on MY phone getting changed to something set by the other person. I know I can revert it to what I had, but WHY THE #^€% do I have to revert it? I was fine with it asking me if I wanted the suggested new info, but leave my existing info alone!!! Besides, the contact photo I set for people is often far better than the low resolution crap or their kid, or stupid Memoji they send me.
I don’t like the way this feature was implemented:
When a contact sets their contact poster, iOS tells me this and makes it look like I can opt into accepting the poster. I want to keep the custom photo that I set, so I just click the × button to remove the “notification.” iOS updates my contact anyway.
Sometimes it replaces my chosen photo with one chosen by the contact. But other times it replaces my photo with the placeholder that just shows the contact’s initials on a black background.
This syncs to my Mac, and in the Mac version of Contacts there does not seem to be a way to reject the contact poster. It appears as though my custom photo was simply deleted.
The iOS version of Contacts does have a Contact Photo & Poster control where I can choose either the Latest Photo (or initials, as the case may be) or my Custom Photo. The former option doesn’t make sense because my custom photo might be newer than the one the contact set. The latter option says Ask Before Updating, which I guess means that in the future iOS will not opt me in. But there is no way to opt out ahead of time or to bulk-restore custom photos for multiple contacts.
See also:
Previously:
Update (2024-05-09): Kyle Howells:
The “iOS 17 Contact Posters” feature being on by default, and overriding what I have already set for my contact, on my phone, is an abomination that should never have been approved.
That feature makes me angry with how disrespectful and user hostile it is.
Update (2024-05-10): Tanner Bennett:
I have to pull out my iOS 14 iPhone 12 to change a contact photo without going through the poster nonsense.
I don’t even know if you CAN use the cool emoji contact picture creator anymore on iOS 17!
The other problem I have is that sometimes reverting the photo in Contacts does not fix it in Messages. One of my Messages conversations, which previously had a custom photo I took, now only shows the initials on a black background.
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It kind of reminds me of that U2 album.
@Kristoffer - I've certainly had worse "gifts" bestowed upon me, and the album wasn't honestly *that* bad.
But at least receiving that album didn't wipe out other albums in my iTunes library.
I’ve run into situations where contacts auto-update, and something in the syncing causes the “revert” option to be the same as the newly updated option, meaning I’ve lost my data.
The default grey appearance for contacts without a poster is also a definite downgrade from previous versions as well.