Contact has 161 MB because of (automated) social media avatar

[dschrempf]

Describe the bug

I noticed out of memory errors on my phone related to DavX5 synchronization (Nextcloud <-> Android). After digging around for a few hours, I saw that one of my Nextcloud contacts has 161MB because of an avatar that was downloaded automatically. The VCF file shows

PHOTO;ENCODING=B;TYPE=PNG;VALUE=BINARY:iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAtAAAALQCAYA
 AAC5V0ecAAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAgAElEQVR42sy92ZIkObIldhSAmW+RGblU1n

and then endless lines of photo data.

Has this been an issue for other users? Did you already encounter such a problem?

Thanks for looking into this!

Steps to reproduce

I didn't do anything special. Just added the contact a while ago. (Email, and name).

Expected behavior

Avatars are small.

Actual behavior

Avatar has 161MB.

Contact version

No response

Operating system

No response

PHP engine version

No response

Web server

No response

Database

No response

Operating system

No response

List of activated Apps

Contacts.

Nextcloud Signing status

No response

Configuration report

No response

Additional info

No response

[call-me-matt]

Oh wow - 161 MB! 😱
Can you check if there are multiple PHOTO-tags for the contact? Maybe there is a bug which is adding pictures instead of replacing them?
And can you cross check the size of the avatar which was downloaded on the respective social network? Is it also that big?

[dschrempf]

Of course I was intelligent enough to delete this contact :(, but I checked on other contacts with pictures (those are smaller, around 5 to 10MB). And yes, already in the first contact I found two PHOTO; tags.

About the social network type. I am not sure how the download works. The only thing I provided for the 161MB contact is a Gmail address. When I click on the contact picture, I have "Get from Gravatar".

[dschrempf]

I should say that this contact was the first on the "All contacts" list with a social media profile picture. Maybe the social media scraper was going down the list and always adding another avatar to this first contact before failing. Because all other contacts wiht social media pictures were much smaller (5-10MB).

[call-me-matt]

So every time you download a new gravatar picture for your contact, a picture is added and not replaced for that person? Can you try the following?

1. create a new contact
2. add an email address that uses gravatar
3. click on the profile picture and select "download from gravatar"
4. wait for the green confirmation info
5. change the email address to another one that uses gravatar
6. click once more on the profile picture and select "download from gravatar"
7. wait for the green confirmation info
8. download the contact and check there is only one PHOTO tag

For me, using contacts 4.0.1 there is never more than one PHOTO tag.
What version of the contacts-App do you use?
If you can, please check in the database which VCARD version number the broken contacts have.

[tcitworld]

We'll need a repair step in server too

[dschrempf]

Thanks for looking into this, and sorry for the late reply.

I followed the steps of @call-me-matt and indeed, only one PHOTO tag is in the contact file, even when changing the email address. When trying to download the avatar a second time, a toast informs me about the avatar already being up to date. So the problem happened already some time ago. This particular avatar that caused a contact to have 161MB has around 1MB, so it was downloaded 150 times in the course of the last months, I guess :-).

[call-me-matt]

When trying to download the avatar a second time, a toast informs me about the avatar already being up to date.

Just to be sure, when changing the address a new photo should be downloaded, the picture should not be up to date anymore and a green toast should state a successful download. And then, still only one photo tag should be attached to the contacts VCF fille because hopefully the picture has been updated, not added.

[dschrempf]

Yes, this was the case!

[roke-julian-lockhart]

Is your desire for all contact-avatars to be lossilly compressed? I desire the opposite, because if my contacts are to contain avatars, I want them to be of the best resolution that is possible. This problem is primarily the fault of the database that is unable to store that picture.