iCloud Contact photos are missing.

[Ben J.]

Suddenly today, most, not all, of the photos of my contacts that I've buit up over the years, are missing! From Messages, Contacts, on my mac and ipad and iphone. They all share contacts via iCloud.

I've searched and found I'm not alone, and I've yet to find a solution. I did find a guy who had been in contact with Apple about it, they had said that they're aware of it, the advice they gave was to make apps not have access to Contacts in privacy settings, but it's not a fix. Might prevent it from happening again. The only app allowed to access Contacts for me is Finder.

I guess I can dig up a backup and try to restore most of the contacts list, but I find this quite outrageous!

Anyone else experience this?

 

[srbNYC]

Over time, I've had one or two contacts lose their photos here and there, but nothing consistent or widespread. Sorry.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Gone in Contacts on the iCloud web interface also?

 

[Ben J.]

Gone in Contacts on the iCloud web interface also?

Excellent point, I just checked, and my google acount contacts have all the photos intact. I really don't know where to go from here. I guess I'll just wait a bit and see. Any idea what's going on?

 

[BrianBaughn]

You checked iCloud and saw your Google account contacts?

 

[Ben J.]

You checked iCloud and saw your Google account contacts?

No. Sorry, I get these mixed up. I'm old.

I went to my google account and found my contacts intact there.

I almost never log into icloud online, but I did now, and I found that most photos are gone like on my devices, not surprisingly.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I suggest using one service or the other but definitely not both…and I prefer Google for my contacts and calendars. With contacts there's not a great advantage feature-wise but Google calendar is loads better.

 

[Ben J.]

I suggest using one service or the other but definitely not both…and I prefer Google for my contacts and calendars. With contacts there's not a great advantage feature-wise but Google calendar is loads better.

Great advice, Brian.

I just deselected contacts and calender in icloud in system settings, and in Contacts preferences I selected google instead of icloud, did a restart and most of the photos are showing up in Contacts and Messages again.

Thank you so much for helping me out. I've said it before; this is a great forum.

iCloud failing like this is still quite bad, though.