Since I’ve tagged my photos in iPhoto with everyones name, a quick iPhoto or Spotlight search lets me easily find an up-to-date photo for friends and family.

Adium will automatically update your address book with your contacts’ user pics, which many people set.

My Nokia cell phone syncs with my address book, contact pictures and all.

And lastly, if you set your picture in your own contact card, and send your vCard to someone, they will then have your picture in their address book.

It’s the Mac way – anywhere a contact can be assocaited with an image, they are, and its all centralized around Address Book.

I don’t have a single picture of anyone’s face in my address book. I don’t know anyone who does. I can’t even think of where I’d put such a picture so that others would happily see it in their address books, even if they wanted to, which I don’t know anyone who does. So let’s say I happen to know someone, somewhere, who does this. I end up with a “Coverflow” view with one or two pictures and a bunch of generic icons. Yeah, great.

http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/07/12/openstep-the-prehistory-of-mailapp-plugins/

Nowadays, a 48×48 bitmap (i.e. B/W only, no grey, no color) is a bit out of date, of course — but it would be a fine possibility to have a similar standard with today’s 64×64 (or bigger) color portrait thumbnails used in OS X.

Or am I missing something?

Ooh, neat! In combination with QuickLook, this can serve as a kind of “name quiz” if you’re trying to associate faces of classmates or business contacts with names — browse through the folder in CoverFlow, saying peoples’ names to yourself as you go. To check your answer, hit space, and the full address book card will pop up.