As some of you might know I’m a very visual person. It’s hard for me to remember names when I don’t have the person’s portrait. That’s why I always add a portrait image to new contacts :)

A while ago I started to manage my contacts using Outlook.com – mostly because I can sync my Outlook.com account with several devices very easily. At the moment my private notebook runs Windows 8.1, my job-related notebook runs Windows 8, my smartphone runs Windows Phone 8 GDR3 and last but not least I own an android tablet. With Outlook.com I can sync my mails, my contacts and my appointments between all these devices. But I had some difficulties adding contact portraits in a way that they are synced too.

Now I found a workaround that enables me to have all contacts synced with their portrait images.

First I have created a SkyDrive (or should I say ‘OneDrive’ now) folder and named it ‘Contact Images’ (you can use any name you like) . Here I save all contact images that should be synced. After I added a new contact (e.g. with the Windows 8.1 contacts app) I save the new contact’s portrait image to that folder. After that I switch to my Windows Phone 8 device, tap on ‘Edit Contact’ and assign the images saved to SkyDrive (OneDrive) to the new contact. After the next sync the new contact’s portrait image gets displayed on on all my devices!

I got the best results with quadratically images and a size of approximately 200*200 (or a few more) pixels. Unfortunately I takes a long time until images that I have saved from my laptop to may SkyDrive (sorry: OneDrive) folder are synced to my Windows Phone 8 device.