Automatic vs manual iPod management

By Jesse Hollington @jhollington ● Friday, February 29, 2008

Q: When my friends receive a call on their iPhone, they’re seeing the picture of the person show up full screen with a banner across the top listing the person’s name. However, on my iPhone, the pictures show up as a much smaller version to the right of the user’s name, and my normal wallpaper still appears. How do I get this full-screen image to appear on my iPhone? Is there a setting I’m missing somewhere?

- Alex

A: Actually, this is not a setting on the iPhone itself, but is determined by how you have added your contact photos to your contacts.

Photos taken with the iPhone’s camera or the iPhone’s photo library and assigned on the iPhone to a contact (using the “Assign to Contact” option from the Photos application, for instance) will always be displayed using a full-screen display in place of the wallpaper, both when receiving calls from that contact or making calls to that contact.

Photos that are assigned to contacts on your computer’s address book application are synced to the iPhone and displayed as a small thumbnail icon to the right of the person’s name.

However, if you’d like to take your existing contact photos that are displayed in the smaller size and convert them to the larger presentation, there is a way this can be done without having to sync all of the original photos from your photo library and reassign them on the iPhone itself. Instead, simply edit the existing photo within your contacts on the iPhone by editing the contact and then tapping on the photo itself while in “Edit” mode. Select “Edit Photo” from the menu that appears, and then simply immediately hit the “Set Photo” button without making any actual changes to the photo. The photo will be re-saved in the larger format and will now display full-screen.

It should be noted, however, that the quality of this will depend entirely on the source and format of the original photo. Low-resolution photos may look quite bad when enlarged to full screen and may therefore need to be synced and re-associated directly from the iPhone’s photo app.