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Add a Picture to Contact in Outlook 2003 via Script

I'm currently writing some code for an event sink that will convert a Vcard attached to a message into a contact in a public folder. Mostly the Vcards that I want to import are from the Palm desktop software which allows you to add images into the contact similar to the new functionality added to Outlook 2003. So as part of my code I had to come up with something that would decode the picture from the vcard file and then add it to the contact in a way Outlook 2003 would understand it. Although I haven't quite finish the vcard code i thought this was worth a separate post.

Basically to add a picture to a contact in Outlook you need to first have the file in jpg format and the name of the file your going to attachment must be ContactPicture.jpg. Once you have attached that file you then need to modify/Add 2 properties on that attachment itself. The only API that you can use to successfully do this (well that I've found) is MAPI. So this means you need to use CDO 1.2 if your scripting. The two props you need to set are

H7FFF000B Set it to true which makes outlook 2003 hide the attachment(still visible in 2002 though)
H370B0003 PR_RENDERING_POSITION needs to be set to -1

The other thing that needs to be done is you need to add a property to the contact itself that tells Outlook that there is Picture for the contact. This property is the named property {00062004-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}0x8015 .

I've put a barebones script together that will do this using a hardcode EntryID that needs to be pulled from the contact using OulookSpy or pfDavAdmin. I've posted a downloadable copy of the code here the script itself looks like.

mapiserver = "servername"
mapimailbox = "mailbox"
contactEntryID = "000000002F7E...etc"
filename = "c:\temp\ContactPicture.jpg"
set objSession = CreateObject("MAPI.Session")
Const Cdoprop1 = &H7FFF000B
const Cdoprop2 = &H370B0003
strProfile = mapiserver & vbLf & mapimailbox
objSession.Logon "",,, False,, True, strProfile
Set objInbox = objSession.Inbox
Set objInfoStore = objSession.GetInfoStore(objSession.Inbox.StoreID)
set objmessage = objSession.getmessage(contactEntryID)
set objAttachments = objmessage.Attachments
Set objAttachment = objmessage.Attachments.Add
objAttachment.Position = -1
objAttachment.Type = 1
objAttachment.Source = filename
objAttachment.ReadFromFile filename
For Each objAttachment In objAttachments
if objAttachment.name = "ContactPicture.jpg" then
objAttachment.fields.add Cdoprop1,"True"
objAttachment.fields(Cdoprop2).value = -1
end if
Next
objmessage.fields.add "0x8015",11,"true","0420060000000000C000000000000046"
objmessage.update

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All sample scripts and source code is provided by for illustrative purposes only. All examples are untested in different environments and therefore, I cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

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