Now, the traditional way of doing that is very tedious. First, you will have to collect photos of everyone who is on your phonebook and then manually add it one by one. But, the good news is, there an Android app that imports profile picture from your WhatsApp contact and set them as a contact picture. So let’s check it out.

How to set contact images using Whatsapp

To get started, install contact photo sync from play store. Update— there is a better app, see the end of the page. Once done, open the app. It will start looking for all the phonebook contacts, who also use WhatsApp. And after the scanning is completed, you will a list.

In the left side of your screen is your phonebook and on the right side is their WhatsApp profile picture.

If don’t see any image on the right side (WhatsApp), then it means the contacts photo is not saved on  your SD card. So, you will have to first save their WhatsApp DP. To do that, tap on the contact name and the app will launch their WhatsApp profile. You will a pop-up box, tap on the ‘do not show this again’ option.

Now enlarge their WhatsApp display picture by tapping on the contact info. Once the image is fully loaded (i.e. full-screen) it will get saved on your SD Card.

Go back, by pressing the back button. This will exit WhatsApp and relaunch the contact photo sync app.

You will see a popup box, hit yes, to confirm.

And that’s it, now you have set display picture for your contact. Now every time you make a call or text them, you will see this profile picture. Now here is the bummer, since WhatsApp do not share their API with the public, there is no way to automate this task. You will have to repeat this step for all your contacts. However, it’s useful to quickly set contact photo,s for few of your frequent contacts. For instance, if you have 100 contacts on your phone, then usually, you only call 20 of them. And it would only take you few minutes to fetch their photos. Update 

I suggest using Contact Photo app. This app has the option to update pictures automatically. Now, don’t get me wrong. you’ll still have to open each photo manually from WhatsApp. But at least the part, where have to set them as a contact photo, can be automated with this app. Overall it takes less time.

See the video tutorial (starts at 2:24)

  Apparently, this app is only for android. But if you are iPhone or windows users then you can use apps like Sync.me or UberSync Facebook  to directly import contact’s display picture from their Facebook profile.