I thought I was helping. The wifey had no backup of her contacts at all. I set her phone up to sync with Nextcloud: our friends and family to a shared contact list and all other contacts to her own contact list. I won in the deal because she had photos of most of her contacts and I had none.
However, her contact photos were reduced to a smaller size with a blurry copy of the photo in the background. Now she “hates her phone” and “feels like she’s using a flip phone.” It’s been around a month now and I just had to hear about it for a solid 15 minutes, so this one isn’t going away. Is there anything I can do or should I offer to pack my bags?
Hi, sorry for the delay! If the pictures are too small this is because they were small on the import of the phone 
We don’t shrink pictures on import on the contact app. That being said you can check if the pictures are really small on the vcard by clicking on the avatar on the latest version (1.5.3). It will display the picture on its original size. Maybe is the phone not displaying correctly?
Just for reference here … I use images around 200x200 pixels in my vcards. They display fine on my phone, and this keeps the size of the image at around 10kb, and therefore the size of each vcard at 20-30kb. I find this is a good compromise.
Some questions: what phone is your wife using, and what contact sync software? Can you export a single .vcf file of one of the affected contacts and see how big it is in kb? Try this from the phone, and also from nextcloud. Compare the two in a text editor. Notice any differences?
Thank you both for responding. She has a Galaxy Note 3, and I used Copy Contacts to copy them from her phone to the DAVdroid account. Since I didn’t have photos on my contacts before this, I didn’t know the small photos were “wrong.” After syncing our contacts to Nextcloud, 2 phones, 2 tablets, and a desktop (with a ZFS mirror), I thought they were replicated well enough that I could delete the originals from her phone’s local contact list.
I emailed a VCF from her phone and the whole file was only 7.9 KB when I saved it to my desktop. Looking at the photo in the Nextcloud Contacts app in my browser, it also showed a small icon. It seems they’re definitely small images now.
I assigned a photo from my phone to a shared contact, synced it across to her phone, and verified that it shows up correctly. Thus, I’m guessing that her photos were resized by the Copy Contacts app–not Nextcloud or DAVdroid–and there’s no going back.
Yep. I agree with you.
Closing