Originally published at: Do You Use It? Contact Posters Remain a Niche Feature - TidBITS
Last week’s Do You Use It? poll about contact posters received relatively few votes, largely because I merely mentioned the poll in “How to Set Contact Avatars and Posters on the iPhone” (17 November 2025), rather than giving it a standalone article. Nevertheless, we can draw a few broad conclusions.
Over half of the TidBITS readers who responded said that they had created no contact posters at all. I suspect many were previously unaware of the feature, as several said just that. That’s not too surprising, since contact posters arrived only two years ago in iOS 17, are fussy to create and share, and are seen in only a few places, most notably on incoming calls.
If you create and share a contact poster for yourself, you won’t really know how others react when it appears on an incoming call. To nudge that response in a desired direction, Australian Apple consultant Michael Thomsen created a custom image of himself underneath his firm’s tagline. He acknowledged that it was a little odd to have it appear on personal calls to friends and family, but considered it a worthwhile tradeoff. I think this is a brilliant approach and would encourage those who want a specific persona associated with their calls to create a customized image to use as a contact poster.
You can create posters for other people, too, but again, you only see them when they call you or when you look at their contact cards. In iOS 26, contact posters also appear in the Phone app’s Unified view.
Very few people said that they created just one or two contact posters. I suspect that those who create only one do it just for themselves, and those who create two do it for themselves and the person who calls them the most, probably a close friend or family member.
However, the fact that more people said they had created 3–5 or 6–10 contact posters suggests that once you’ve figured out how to create one or two, it’s easy enough to do more for additional close contacts. Few people have gone whole hog and created 11 or more, though—the contact posters just aren’t that big of a win, and most people probably don’t regularly field calls from that many contacts. It may also be hard to come by good photos for some contacts.
In the end, contact posters are a nice little addition to the iPhone experience, but they’re far from game-changing. Apple could simplify contact poster creation by improving linking between Contacts and Photos and judiciously applying Apple Intelligence features, but, as they say, the juice may not be worth the squeeze.
