You know what’s not cool? Having that default block letter as a contact picture for your favorite contacts in your phone. They’re your favorites! Your besties, your husband or wife, even your kids. C’mon guys, they deserve better than the first letter of their first name. It’s up to you to make this right. But don’t fret—we’re here to help. It’s kinda what we do.
Before we get started, it’s worth pointing out that this process may vary slightly between manufacturers. Since all the big ones—Samsung, LG, Huawei, etc.—all do their own thing where the dialer is concerned, it may look slightly different depending on what model you’re using. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to figure out what to do once you get started, because the contacts portion of most dialers isn’t that different.
Okay, ready? Let’s do this thing.
The first thing you’ll want to do is open the dialer (also known as the “Phone” app). From there, just find the contact you’d like to add/change the picture for.
This is the part where things may vary depending on your handset. On most phones, you tap the picture itself to open the contact card. The primary exemption here is in the Favorites list on Samsung and Stock Android phones: tapping the image will call the contact. You’ll need to tap the little “i” on Samsung phones, or the three-dot overflow menu button on stock phones. In the full contact list, however, you can still just tap the picture. It’s stupid, really.
Once on the contact card page, hit the “Edit” button—it may say the word “edit,” or it may just be a pencil icon. Either way, it should be in the upper right corner. Out of the phones I tested, the Huawei Honor 5X was the only one that had it in a different place—it’s at the bottom. Still, it should be pretty clear which icon to tap.
This is the menu where you can edit everything dealing with that particular contact, not just the picture. But changing the image is pretty easy: just tap it. Tapping the picture will open an edit edit menu where you can take a new picture or select one from the Gallery, then crop it to your liking.
Once chosen, it will show up in the contact’s card.
When you’re done, just hit “Save”—the new image should sync across all your Android devices.
While Android’s openness is easily one of its biggest strengths, it’s also what makes simple things like changing a contact picture a more convoluted process than it should be since it doesn’t work the same way across devices. Fortunately, it isn’t that difficult regardless of manufacturer UI, especially once you’ve done it at least once.
