469517 - Display user photo in message header bar

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Susurrus]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081206 Shiretoko/3.1b3pre Ubiquity/0.1.3rc6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20081205 Shredder/3.0b2pre

Like title says. A good start would be to look at how OS X's Mail.app does it. The sender's picture is displayed on the far right if one is given in the address book.

Depends on 119459.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Susurrus]

Attachment: Mail.app showing contact picture from Address Book on OS X

Comment 3

[Indi]

We could look at AddressBookPix add-on for methods that were worked out for displaying contact pictures in header. Sadly, I can't seem to contact the author about modifying it to make it TB3 compatible.

Comment 4

[burkinafaso76]

You could also have a look at this addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2843

Comment 5

[Josh Geenen (:pi)]

I recently wrote an add-on [0] which displays contact photos in the header or a Gravatar if a photo wasn't found.

The majority of the work is in mainOverlay.js [1] and a significant amount of the code there is only used for Seamonkey.

Currently the add-on overrides the following functions:

AddExtraAddressProcessing - this is where the URI of the img is set
onClickEmailStar - updates the current AB and contact (clicking on the contact brings up the edit contact dialog if the contact is in the AB clicking on the e-mail star can add the contact to the AB)
editContactInlineUI.DeleteContact - also updates the current AB and contact

Other than that, it just modifies the header and inserts an hbox and the image container between expandedHeaderView and expandedHeadersBox.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/57991
[1] http://www.mozdev.org/source/browse/contactphotos/src/content/mainOverlay.js

Comment 6

[burkinafaso76]

Great Josh!
This is exactly what I was thinking about. And it seems to work already well!
Still think that it should be natively supported by TB, though...

Comment 7

[Ruben]

the Contact Photos AddOn looks fine to me.
but it has a bug on ubuntu 11.04:
after some time the name of folders with unread emails starts moving a bit left over the icon of the folder

see attached image:
http://www.imagebanana.com/view/c5g8xuz8/thunderbird_contact_pics_error.jpeg

Comment 9

[Ruben]

Please vote for this on Get Satisfaction:
https://getsatisfaction.com/t/2zsoa

Comment 10

[Ruben]

(In reply to Ruben from comment #7)
> the Contact Photos AddOn looks fine to me.
> but it has a bug 
that bug only exists in the default Thunderbird theme on ubuntu.
if you change the theme to Microbird 2.0.7 the bug is gone

Comment 11

[Pander]

Does a bug report for this exist on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu ?

Comment 12

[Ruben]

Thunderbird should display a gravatar identicon from gravatar (Identicon, MonsterID, Wavatar) if you have no picture.
Other options like Retro, vanillicon, VisiGlyphs or unicornify as replacement should be also implemented

see:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/30408/

Comment 13

[Pander]

At the moment, this is the best add-on available:
  http://www.pirules.org/addons/contactphotos/index.php

Some extra requirements to ponder about:
- allow to set a default photo for people that do not have a photo (this would also override default image of gravatar etc.)
- allow to display nothing when no photo or default gravatar is returned
- allow displaying small photo in compose window
- allow displaying small photo in address book overview pane (list)

Comment 14

[Ruben]

I think, that one has some more options:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/display-contact-photo/?src=ss

this also 
- shows the photo in the compose window
- lets you define a local folder on your harddrive with photos named as {email}.jpg
- supports Faces

Comment 15

[Ruben]

related: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/1088420

Comment 16

[John Duncan]

I have resurrected an ancient Thunderbird/SeaMonkey addon which supports X-Face/Face/X-Image-URL/Face-URL/X-Face-URL/local photos/picons(local and web lookups thanks to Steve Kinzler)/contact photo (address book photo) display in the message header area. This should be the cleanest/no-nonsense implementation of this stuff out there, in my opinion. 

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/MessageFaces

Comment 17

[Pander]

Super! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/contact-photos/ is still working for me. when/where is your add-on on https://addons.mozilla.org ?

Comment 18

[John Duncan]

Hello Pander. This add-on is primarily for those who wish to have all of those aforementioned features in one clean add-on. 

I have been in contact with the original author (Mr. Jens Bannmann), who will be transferring me ownership of the original AMO repository so I can (officially) update the add-on.

The original AMO link was: http://web.archive.org/web/20121113033846/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/393

Comment 19

[Seth]

I believe this is already handled in Thunderbird v115 and can be closed, right?
https://cloud.falco.fun/s/3JcDptdT77D84c3