Workaround for Ice Cream Sandwich low resolution contact images

So there has been a lot of interest in lately in a workaround for the contact images problem in Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). To wit: the latest version of Android supports and displays contact images at a resolution of 256x256 pixels while Google's servers which store and sync the images only supports 96x96. This makes for some really bad looking images on the phone. Google's solution has been to use Google+ to sync pictures from a user's profile. There is also an app called Haxsync that does the same thing for Facebook contacts. These solutions work great. The problem for me is that many of my contacts use a picture of something other than themselves for their Facebook/Google+ profile picture.  I want my own image to be used.

Now if I were to set the image on one device it will be high resolution on that device. Then it gets uploaded to Google and synced to my other device and I am back where I started.

But I think I have found a solution. It takes a little bit of work and is not as nice as Google just supporting high resolution images natively, but oh well.

I first use the native Gallery app to crop down a picture to just the person's face. This is easy because the app uses face recognition to find faces. I then use FolderSync to move that cropped photo to a special folder for just my contact photos and rename the photo to the person's name (exactly as it is in my contacts). HD Contact Photos then applies each photo to their respective contact at the maximum resolution of 256x256. (This is why the names have to be exact, that is how HD Contact Photos knows which photo goes with which person.)

Ok, one device done, but what about the other? Easy. I use FolderSync to sync that contact photos folder to Box.net (you can use anything, Google Drive, Dropbox, or even Amazon EC2). I set it up as a two way sync so changes I make on one device show up on the other and I do this on both devices. The I use HD Contact Photos to apply the pictures on device two and voila, high resolution images on both.

Now when I update a photo on one device the photo is sent to the other. I just have to go to HD Contact Photos to apply the image. I am still waiting for Google to fix the bug but this will work in the mean time.