Fastest way to set a contact picture on Android

Question

Recently, I got an Android for my father instead of the iPhone he always had.

Well, his main complaint is that his contacts have no picture associated, that would be simple to sync with facebook. I had done that before in the old days for my phone using an app, but now, since facebook removed the capability of apps to access users pictures, all the apps that should do that, such as "Contact photo sync" became useless and are nothing but a swamp of ads.

Now, the only method I found is manually is going to someone's picture on Facebook, doing an export to external application and then choosing "Set as contact picture" in the export selection.

Would be simple if it wasn't for this simple feature missing in pure Android, the contact photo export does not appear in the "export options" as an application (I am using 6.0 on Nexus X5) . So now what I have to do is save the picture on the device, then setting it as a contact picture, having to navigate on multiple windows instead of directly exporting.

I am pretty sure I've seen the "Set as contact picture" before on another version of android, or some branded version.

Ultimately, my question is: how to export to a contact without having to save it on the phone? Are there any apps that would export from the "transference area" directly to the contact picture?

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no simple, fast solution to this, Facebook has actively made this difficult and even though there were solutions for older versions of Android, they all related to the Facebook API, not Android which was just doing documented calls that are not supported any longer.

However, if your father uses Google+ you CAN sync Google+ and Google account pictures to contacts.

Open Google+ and go to Menu (3 lines) and select Settings, then tap the Google account used on the device, scroll down to Contacts, and in that menu enable "Keep contacts up to date". Note that this will also put your user account and Google account avatar in sync, and most SMS/MMS Messaging apps will use this information as well and display the contacts profile picture in the message stream.

Contacts can also be edited online by logging into the Google account in question and going to Google Contacts page. Again it is not speedy, but it will work, and there is some import/export functionality on this page as well, but I don't believe it relates to profile pictures.