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Where is the profile picture saved to?

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Original poster
Sep 17, 2011
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When I first bought the MBA, it asked to take a picture of me. I thought it turned out real well so I am trying to keep a copy of it. But for the life of me, i can't locate it anywhere. Google didn't help either. Anyone has an answer?
 
Try Home Folder/Library/Images/iChat Recent Pictures

Okay here's another one, try:

Macintosh HD/Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.tiff

The number may be different depending on how many user accounts your Mac has.
 
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Thanks.

Using Macintosh HD/Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.tiff, I did find a picture but it was a picture taken later on. My profile picture, address book, as well as ichat icon still have the original picture taken when my MBA was first set up. I don't know why the newer picture didn't replace the original but I am glad it didn't. Is there any more suggestion?
 
Found more interesting pictures...guess these are pictures of entries on address book. But strangely, my own entry's picture is not found in that folder (shown on address book though). I was able to drag the picture to desktop, it's only 96x96 though. At this point, I am willing to think this is just a bug on 10.7.2. The new picture should have taken over the original. And while the original still shows on profile picture, address book and ichat, I should be able to locate it. So this is just weird, to say the least.

Could the original pic be a hidden file? anyway to make it show the hidden files?

Anyway, i am considering of restoring the picture from my time machine backup, do you think i will have any luck doing that? Is there a way i can restore a certain folder instead of the entire system?
 
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Since you're running Lion have you made your user Library visible and looked in the Images/iChat Recent Pictures folder? You can get to your user Library folder by going to Finder and holding down the Option key while clicking the Go menu. The Library folder should then be visible and you can select it to get access to it.

Under Snow Leopard you can restore individual files, folders, etc. from Time Machine. I hope that you can still do that under Lion. I don't know if it would work or not in this situation though.
 
Guess what? More discovery!

I found another version here:

/Users/Andy/Library/Caches/com.apple.iChat/Pictures

It's only 64 x 64, so it's even smaller than the one I found yesterday.


Btw, while browsing the library, i found out that there are actually two library location on my system:
1. /Library
2. /Users/Andy/Library

Are they the same folder?

I will try time machine and report back. Thanks.
 
whohasaquestion said:
Guess what? More discovery!

I found another version here:

/Users/Andy/Library/Caches/com.apple.iChat/Pictures

It's only 64 x 64, so it's even smaller than the one I found yesterday.


Btw, while browsing the library, i found out that there are actually two library location on my system:
1. /Library
2. /Users/Andy/Library

Are they the same folder?

I will try time machine and report back. Thanks.
Click to expand...

No, they're not the same. The first library is the system library and the second is the user library. The first applies to all users, the second is unique to each user. The second is the one I referred to in my last message and is now hidden under Lion.

Have you looked here?:

/Users/Andy/Library/Images/iChat Recent Pictures
 
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The new profile picture is saved to /library instead of /user/library....so maybe that's why it didn't replace the original.

To answer your previous question, no, I don't have a Images/iChat Recent Pictures folder.

Btw, the Cache folders in Time Machine are empty...I don't think it backs those up.
 
Well, that pretty much exhausts everything I'm aware of concerning profile picture location. I'm guessing Apple has done something different with Lion and that location hasn't made it's way to the net yet. Sorry, we couldn't find it.
 
Sometimes apple just want to hide things so deeply that it's almost impossible for user to find files.


Thanks for the great help regardless the result!
 
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Didn't find the location, but discovered something I didn't know. Hope it's still like this in Lion.

If you go to Address Book, select your card and double click your picture you'll get a page to re-size, re-position the image, or take a new one with the iSight or choose another of the stock images...and...at top of the window is a pop-down that says Recent Pictures, if you click it you'll get a page with all the custom images (I believe) that were used for the account. Not sure this is of any use since you can't drag the image out of the page (it just re-positions it) but it's something that I didn't know was there and wanted to share.
 
Yeah, I can verify that 10.7.2 works much the same way. iChat can show recent pictures too. I simply lost the original file, at least i am willing to believe now.

I also learn quite a bit during this whole process, maybe I will gain the same proficiency as in windows environment in term of file management. ;)
 
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whohasaquestion said:
When I first bought the MBA, it asked to take a picture of me. I thought it turned out real well so I am trying to keep a copy of it. But for the life of me, i can't locate it anywhere. Google didn't help either. Anyone has an answer?
Click to expand...


I found a way to do it!
1. Go to your contacts/address book
2. Find yourself
3. Change your profile picture to the picture you want to save
4. Click on the picture so that it has the blue thing around it (just shows that you clicked on it)
5. Press Command + C
6. You can go on iMessage and paste!
 
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