Storing contact avatars seems to have changed and broke for certain clients.

[RobertZenz]

I've just noticed that storing the avatar of contacts seems to have changed in the last half year or so. Previously the avatars of contacts where stored like this in the vcf file:

PHOTO;TYPE=PNG;ENCODING=b:AVATAR_IN_BASE64_FOLLOWS

With the latest version (3.1.3) avatars are being stored like this:

PHOTO;VALUE=URI:data:image/png;base64,AVATAR_IN_BASE64_FOLLOWS

This, however, seems to break in certain clients (UBports being one of them) as they will not recognize the avatars.

Was that a consciousness change or did I miss something here?

[skjnldsv]

Vcard 3 I presume?
Duplicate of #1140

[RobertZenz]

I just noticed that you can add Nextcloud Mail to the list of application with which avatars have stopped working. The old ones still work fine, all newly assigned ones do not show up in the mail application.

So, this might require a second look as it is not about a third-party application storing avatars differently then contacts expects, but contacts storing it differently then everybody else expects.

[skjnldsv]

@RobertZenz are the avatar url failing for you?
can you check by appending ?photo to the direct dav url of the problematic vcards? :)

Does it generate any error in your nextcloud logs?

[RobertZenz]

mail tries to fetch the photo but receives a 404.

How do I retrieve the DAV URL of a single card?

No, there's nothing in the log.

[skjnldsv]

How do I retrieve the DAV URL of a single card?

this is the download link :)
Instead of clicking you can right click and copy :)

[RobertZenz]

Okay, that gives me the image (even though it is wrongly named, it's got the name and extension of the vcf file).

[skjnldsv]

Hum, so loading the image works, but not in contacts?
Can you check if this is a duplicate of #1140 or not?

[RobertZenz]

No, it works fine in contacts, it doesn't work in mail and other third-party clients in which it used to work.

[skjnldsv]

So, if it works fine in contacts, what is this issue about? 🙈 😁

[RobertZenz]

That it used to work fine in all applications, now it doesn't. So something changed in contacts that broke it for these applications. And, actually, all I wanted to know is whether that was a deliberate change along the way or if it was a mistake.

[skjnldsv]

Aaah, ok
The contacts app doesn't have anything to do with other applications :)
You will have to open dedicated issues on those apps 😉

[RobertZenz]

Okay, I'll try once again: Did you change anything, rather recently, regarding storing of the avatar which might have broken other applications? Like changed the vCard version or the version of the library which you might use?

[skjnldsv]

Ah! Make more sense, sorry :)
Well, with the 3.x.x version, we are now properly styoring photo exept for some vcard reader on vcard3 versions 🙈
See the mentioned issue above ;)

[RobertZenz]

Just for your information, this is broken on your end.

I just found the time to do some more tests, and when I replace the "URI" variant of the avatar with the "TYPE PNG" one, everything is working as expected for everyone. The avatars are then also reachable through the web address again, which means that the Nextcloud Mail client can also load and display them again, which has stopped working.

On another note, it's not always stored like that. I created a new contact and set the avatar, it was stored in the "TYPE PNG" variant. However, the card was still of version 3.0, so I'm not sure why that got stored different.

[skjnldsv]

Yes @RobertZenz you're 100% right
This is what #1140 is all about :)
vcard3 are using a slightly different syntax, and we're not compliant :(

[skjnldsv]

Fix in #1239