All of my contact pictures disappeared

Hi

This is a follow-up to All of my contact pictures disappeared - Apple Community that has meanwhile be closed. I have checked all the hints given in that thread:

• Apple services all up and running
• My contacts are set to sync with iCould on all my devices
• Restarted phone
• ....

However, I noticed that the pictures have gone on all devices, are even invisible on iCloud. So, a simple restart of the iPhone was most unlikely to resolve this problem. I then set up these contacts anew by choosing relevant pictures from my library, a time-consuming, rather tedious task. It then worked for a while, but 2 hours later, they had gone again. I can hardly imagine someone hacked into my account, as I have a complicated password, plus 2FA activated.

Luckily, I had made a backup of my contacts quite some time ago. However, given the fact that a restore overwrites the existing data, I proceeded as follows:

• Click your contacts_(date).abbu file
• Select "Show package contents"
• Select "Images" folder
• In Finder, activate preview
• Scroll through the files, one by one
• Once you found the picture of the right person, copy the file to a different directory. Choose (name of person) as filename and add a ".jpg" extension
• Edit your contact and drag the ".jpg" file you just created to the picture of the person. Instructions
• Repeat this for all the contacts which you lost the picture for
• Once you completed, very importantly: Create a new back-up. Instructions
• For security reasons, copy this file to a different location as well.

I hope this may help.