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             Do You Use It? Contact Posters Remain a Niche Feature

   Adam Engst

   Last week's [1]Do You Use It? poll about contact posters received
   relatively few votes, largely because I merely mentioned the poll in
   '[2]How to Set Contact Avatars and Posters on the iPhone' (17 November
   2025), rather than giving it a standalone article. Nevertheless, we can
   draw a few broad conclusions.

   Over half of the TidBITS readers who responded said that they had
   created no contact posters at all. I suspect many were previously
   unaware of the feature, as several said just that. That's not too
   surprising, since contact posters arrived only two years ago in iOS 17,
   are fussy to create and share, and are seen in only a few places, most
   notably on incoming calls.

   If you create and share a contact poster for yourself, you won't really
   know how others react when it appears on an incoming call. To nudge
   that response in a desired direction, Australian Apple consultant
   Michael Thomsen created a custom image of himself underneath his
   [3]firm's tagline. He acknowledged that it was a little odd to have it
   appear on personal calls to friends and family, but considered it a
   worthwhile tradeoff. I think this is a brilliant approach and would
   encourage those who want a specific persona associated with their calls
   to create a customized image to use as a contact poster.

   You can create posters for other people, too, but again, you only see
   them when they call you or when you look at their contact cards. In iOS
   26, contact posters also appear in the Phone app's Unified view.

   Very few people said that they created just one or two contact posters.
   I suspect that those who create only one do it just for themselves, and
   those who create two do it for themselves and the person who calls them
   the most, probably a close friend or family member.

   However, the fact that more people said they had created 3'5 or 6'10
   contact posters suggests that once you've figured out how to create one
   or two, it's easy enough to do more for additional close contacts. Few
   people have gone whole hog and created 11 or more, though'the contact
   posters just aren't that big of a win, and most people probably don't
   regularly field calls from that many contacts.

   In the end, contact posters are a nice little addition to the iPhone
   experience, but they're far from game-changing. Apple could simplify
   contact poster creation by improving linking between Contacts and
   Photos and judiciously applying Apple Intelligence features, but, as
   they say, the juice may not be worth the squeeze.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://talk.tidbits.com/t/do-you-use-it-contact-posters/32341?u=ace
   2. https://tidbits.com/2025/11/17/how-to-set-contact-avatars-and-posters-on-the-iphone/
   3. https://www.origin84.com/

   Hidden links:
   4. https://tidbits.com/uploads/2025/11/DYUI-contact-posters.png

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