Google Contact photos are a much neglected feature of the Google Stack. It really adds to the user experience when you see each of your contact photos when you make or receive a call. However, it can be a real pain (especially if you have hundreds of contacts).

But I had an idea recently, to try and match my Google Contact emails with Gravatar and try to auto-populate some of the dozens of contacts that didn’t already have a photo (after all a Gravatar is better than nothing).

So I wrote a Ruby script to find my contacts missing a photo and try to update it with a Gravatar (wherever possible). NB: You may need to first install the GData (Google Data) gem by opening a Terminal window and issuing: sudo gem install gdata.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

# Google Contact Photos - Gravatar Importer
# Written by Ashley Angell
# http://ashleyangell.com
# Licenced under Creative Commons with Attribution

require "rubygems"
require "gdata"
require "rexml/document"
require "digest/md5"
require "net/http"
include REXML

none = 'd5fe5cbcc31cff5f8ac010db72eb000c'
user = ARGV[0]
pass = ARGV[1]

client = GData::Client::Contacts.new
client.clientlogin(user, pass)
data = client.get("https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/contacts/#{user}/full?max-results=10000")
myxml = Document.new data.body
p "contacts"
puts "-"*70
i = 0
myxml.each_element("feed/entry") do |e|
  begin
    gd = e.elements['gd:email']
    if !gd.nil?
      email = gd.attributes['address'].downcase
      hash = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(email)
      image_src = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/#{hash}"
      nil_image = false
      image_element = e.get_elements("link[@rel='http://schemas.google.com/contacts/2008/rel#photo']")[0]
      if !image_element.nil? and image_element.attributes['gd:etag'].nil?
        data = nil
        md5 = nil
        Net::HTTP.start(URI.parse(image_src).host) do |http|
          resp = http.get(URI.parse(image_src).path)
          data = resp.body
          md5 = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(data)
          File.open("#{email}.png", 'w') do |f|
            f.puts data if md5 != none
          end
        end
        md5 = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(data)
        if md5 != none
          puts "#{email} > #{image_src}"
          client.put_file(image_element.attributes['href'], "#{email}.png", 'image/png')
          i = i + 1
        else
          puts "#{email} > no match"
        end
      else
        puts "#{email} > skipped (already has photo)"
      end
      File.delete("#{email}.png") if File.exists?("#{email}.png")
    end
  rescue Exception => ex
    puts ex
  end
end
puts "Updated #{i} contact photos"

To execute it, simply copy and paste this into a text editor (or download it and unzip) and from Terminal (command) window and execute the following commands:

sudo chmod +x googlegravatarimporter.rb [Enter]
./googlegravatarer.rb your.address@gmail.com your_password [Enter]

It will cycle through your Google Contacts and indicate what action was taken. For me, surprisingly updated a few dozen contacts (even more than I expected).

I’ve posted this here for others that might want to do the same thing but cannot be bothered writing the script for it. Consider it posted here under Creative Commons with Attribution.