cocoaforge

Hi, so I've decided to integrate my applications more and allow Adium to transfer buddy icons to my corresponding address book contacts. I've clicked the little checkbox under Adium preferences/advanced that says "Overwrite Address Book images with contacts' icons" and at first it didn't work at all. I closed both programs, and reopened them, and then there were 3 cards (1 was mine) that had icons, the rest had none. I've made sure the AIM names listed in the address cards are correct, and they all do have buddy icons. In addition, I've selected the "Import my contacts' names from Address Book" option, and that works fine ... so what gives?

This is sort of odd, perhaps Adium only sends the icons over when it recieves them and doesn't do it retroactively for icons you've already downloaded.

A simple test would be to clear the icon of one of your buddies, wait for it to come down, and then check their address book card to see if it worked.

If it works, you can get rid of Adium's cache of icons and let it get them all again, but don't jump right into that, try it with just one first.

Er, how do I clear a contact's buddy icon? :]

Depends on the version of Adium you're running, but if its .89.1 like I assume it to be, get info on the contact (cmd-i) and select their icon in the top left and press the delete key.

If you're running any pre-release version of adium, you'll see a more obvious "clear" button there.

Yeah, I'm running 0.89.1. I see the icon, I click it and it highlights, but when I press delete, nothing happens...icon's still there. I checked the address book in case it was just downloading the icon very quickly, but no dice. Any other ideas?

Yeah, it's probably still worth your while to nuke (or at least move and rename) your icon cache, just to be sure. The problem is that if I recall correctly It's systemwide and I'm not sure where its stored, I'm trying to dig it up now, I remember Evands mentioning it at one point or another...

Edit: Okay, apologies but I need to run for a while, and I couldn't find it easily. I'm going to pass the puck for this one onto a developer that will know where the icons are stored, and perhaps how the Adium code itself works.

I was about to enable this option myself, so knowing how it works intrigued me, so any insight you can give would benefit me as well =P

The clear button seems to explain what it does but doesn't actually, which is why it's going away again in favor of a more context-sensitive "go back" arrow overlay which only appears over the buddy icon in the Get Info window when it would have an effect. Its effect is the same as the Clear button's: Go back to using a contact's own icon after you have manually set one.

Adium 0.89.1 only downloads buddy icons over AIM as necessary. You'll need to delete the ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/libgaim to while Adium is quit to force a redownload on next launch.

You were right, LuxuryChair, about the Address Book icon only being set in response to an icon being downloaded -- in the typical case, this is desirable, because we wouldn't want to go through and modify 100 address book entries every time Adium launches as the cached icons are loaded.

Will I lose any information by deleting that libgaim folder?

I deleted the libgaim folder while quit, and launched adium - the icons were all there (i.e. no lag time while getting them from the server) and the address book images are still mostly not there...

No information lost. Adium keeps its own cache, so deleting that folder won't clear them for you visibly. If you also delete ~/Library/Caches/Adium (and the libgaim folder mentioned previously), you'll see that Adium knows nothing of icons and you'll see the changes as they come in. It won't be instantaneous.

Right, it will take time to re-download them. If you're using AIM it usually takes a conversation with three or four messages before the server will send you the buddy icon.

Okay cool - it seems to have worked (the icons are the default). Thanks for your help!