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Google Messages restores your control over custom photos for contacts
- Profile Discovery in Google Messages let your friends choose the photo they’d appear in your app as.
- Messages had been working on a new option to let you override that pic, using your locally defined Contacts settings.
- That choice is finally available now, and you can swipe between pics to choose the one you prefer.
Photos can make it so much easier to quickly find the person we’re looking for as we scroll through a long list of contacts. That’s part of why we were so excited to see Google Messages pick up Profile Discovery last year, making it easy for our friends to choose how they’d like to appear on our phones. For as useful as that was, though, it felt like it was taking some control out of our hands — what if you’re used to associating your BFF with a goofy pic from some in-joke, and now you’re stuck with the same boring headshot as everybody?
Thankfully, we spotted work a few months ago on a tweak to Messages that would let you override Profile Discovery pictures with ones of your choosing. And now, as 9to5Google has noticed, that change appears to finally be live.
Google confirms as much on its support page for profiles in Messages, where a new section outlines the steps you can take in order to replace the image your friend chose for themselves through Profile Discovery with the one you’d like to use, instead:
- Open Google Messages.
- Open a conversation with the contact.
- At the top of the conversation, tap the Contact’s name or Profile picture.
- On top of the details page, tap the Profile picture.
- To switch between the shared profile picture and your local contact photo, swipe left or right.
That’s basically all there is to it — just swipe to replace with the pic from the Contacts app. Honestly, this is the sort of approach Google really should have taken from the beginning with Profile Discovery, using it to augment the photos you already associate with your contacts, rather than just replacing them and leaving you with little recourse.