Unfortunately Thunderbird (Mac) CardDav address books don't display contact photos from Contacts.app Even if you succeed to add a photo while editing a contact in the CardDav address book in Thunderbird, it will disappear immediately when you click the "Save" button, no matter which image format you choose. Thunderbird and macOS address books never liked each other very much......

I did notice Evolution Mail does show the avatars in their Contacts view correctly; however no avatars in their mail view, and their mail view does not seem aware of saved contacts, as it always prompts to save addresses as new contacts.

However, all other clients I tried, didn't have any address book avatar support; Geary, Mailspring, Vivaldi.

Maybe the Evolution Mail code can be referred to by those interested.

Unfortunately for those that coose to use apple contact via the apple app, you only get read only access to them in any other apps. SO the mess you speak of in evolution is an outshoot of this deliberate limitation placed by apple. Thunderbird just calls the thing read only and makes no attempt to do anything with the contacts other than list them really.

So I guess the question is, are your contacts supplied by icloud via the industry standard carddav or via the apple contacts on your machine which is read only.

Generally if the avatar is not showing correctly the advice is to update the contact avatar at icloud.com and allow the update to sync. As I use neither apple products, r any apple products truth be told, I can only regurgitate when I have heard, not what I know to be correct.

@Matt, this is via contacts.icloud.com (apple's carddav server) via thunderbird via fedora linux, in which it is read-write, however the avatars are not supported in thunderbird, but are supported via evolution.

This is via contacts.icloud.com (apple's carddav server) via thunderbird via fedora linux, in which it is read-write, however the avatars are not supported in thunderbird, but are supported via evolution.