Vignette is a new single-purpose utility that solves a small, yet frustrating problem. If you’re like me, you don’t like seeing the gray circles when you’re calling someone or messaging a friend on iMessage. I usually add contact pictures manually. While that’s easy to do for your favorite contacts, it becomes a hassle for your whole contact book. Vignette fixes this problem by searching for photos from social media and linking them to your contacts.
How Vignette Finds and Updates Contact Photos
The premise is simple. While you might not have the latest photo of contact, their social media page probably does. It can be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even Gravatar. You can go to these pages, download the images individually and add them to a contact. But that can take hours.
Using Vignette you can do this in just a couple of minutes. Once you grant contact access permission, the app will analyze and cull through your entire contact book. Before you begin, the app suggests that you spend some time adding details like the person’s email address or Twitter link, this will make it easier for the app to find the updated photo.
Once the searching is done, you’ll see a list of contacts with the current photo, and the suggested photo from social media. You can check the photos that you do want to sync and uncheck the ones you don’t. Then just press the Update Contacts button to replace the contact photos. The app will update them behind the scenes, without polluting your Camera Roll.
So far, the app is free to use. But to actually replace the photos in the Contact Book, you’ll have to pay for a one-time in-app purchase of $4.99 to unlock the full app. Once you’ve paid, the app will update the contact book. You don’t need to worry about the privacy details as the app does not upload any of your contacts to the cloud and does not make money by sharing private information.
Download: Vignette (Free, $4.99 to unlock full app)
How Do You Manage Your Contact Book?
Do you use an app for sharing and syncing contacts? Do you always make sure that your contacts have updated profile pictures? Share with us in the comments below.
