HOWTO: Sync Blackberry with Vista Contact Images

I have loyally touted around my Blackberry Curve (8310) now for almost exactly a year now (358 days to be exact). But recently, because of some problems I was having, and an upcoming need for my current contact list to be on my computer I decided I would install the Desktop Manager software and get my Blackberry contacts synced up with my Vista contacts. Support for syncing with Vista contacts was added to the Desktop Manager software in version 4.3, and the current version at the time of this writing is 4.7, so this isn’t a new feature.Before anybody hops on the comments below and starts giving me a lecture on why I should just use Outlook instead let me explain. I know Outlook is better than the provided applications in Vista but frankly, the contacts and mail program in Vista suits me just fine for at home. To be frank, I don’t need or want the bulk of Outlook, for work I use Evolution.

Setting up the sync job was easy enough, but when I tried to do the sync I got an error: “Connector Specific Error”. Ugh. Why can’t it ever just work?

Some digging online and in the sync log wasn’t much help. The only real information in the local log is:

Internal Error #4238.
Translation Canceled!

Which is also a dead end Google search. So, being me I started troubleshooting the problem. Long story short, it seems to be a problem with contact photos. It looks like there is a bug in the way that Intellisync enumerates the Vista contacts database. It looks to me like the contact photo doesn’t get flushed when Intellisync moves to the next record. You can check by creating two Vista contacts, the first (alphabetically) with a linked picture, and the second without and push those to your Blackberry, the second contact will end up with the photo from the first contact (assuming the sync doesn’t fail). I’m not sure what about this bug causes Internal Error #4238 (it doesn’t fail on the first Vista contact without an image, but it does always fail on one without an image).

The solution? I don’t really have one. But I do have a couple workarounds, both exploiting the fact that this bug doesn’t occur if every contact has a linked image. First things first though, some prep work. Go to your Vista contacts, and backup all the contacts into a safe place, we are going to be doing some file manipulation here and you wouldn’t want to be without a backup. Next, if you want to get contacts from your blackberry, move all your Vista contacts somewhere outside of the contacts folder (the desktop works good for this) and sync the Blackberry. This will create new Vista contacts for all of your Blackberry contacts. Now you can move the contacts from your desktop back into the contacts folder and do some cleanup to get a single full listing in one place.

The only problem is that Intellisync makes a mess with any photos you had on your Blackberry for contacts. If you open up your Pictures folder you’ll see a bunch of numerically named folders, each with a single contact picture in it. Personally, this doesn’t work for me so I moved all the images into a single folder. If you do this though, dont forget to re-link the Vista contact with the image. I also added new images to a large number of my contacts while I was here.

Workaround #1: Use Outlook

Intellisync’s Outlook enumerator doesn’t seem to have this bug.

Workaround #2: Don’t sync images

If you go into the advanced settings of the address book sync, you can adjust the field mappings and simply turn off the mapping for contact image.

Workaround #2: Give every contact an image

This workaround is more suited for people who have images on nearly all their contacts already. The easy solution is to use a generic image (like this one) for any contact that you don’t have a picture for. This will satisfy the intellisync program without any serious trickery.

Workaround #3: Do a two part sync

This work around isn’t for the feint of heart, but was what I ended up doing because I made sweeping changes to my contact list after I got it in Vista. First, I copied all my contacts to the desktop. Next, I deleted every contact in the contacts folder that DID NOT have an image and setup a one-way sync to my blackberry. I even told Intellisync to replace the list on my device. Once those contacts were on the phone I reset the sync settings, moved the contacts from my desktop back into the contacts folder and removed the field mapping for contact images in Intellisync and performed another sync to get the remaining contacts on the phone.

This worked for me, but it does have the downside that if I add images to contacts I have to repeat the whole process just for a single image. I tried to find contact information for Intellisync so I could report the bug to them, but the Intellisync domain seems to point to the Nokia servers and there isn’t anything on Nokia’s website of use. I didn’t search much harder after that since I’m planning to be using something diffrent in a few days anyway to make calls