Apple is adding numerous features to the iPhone with iOS 17, and one of the most notable is Contact Poster, a way to create your own digital calling card through images, colors, and text.
Here’s how it works: When you call someone from iPhone to iPhone and you’re saved to their contacts, your contact banner will appear on their screen. It replaces the much smaller notification and thumbnail image that was previously displayed and gives you the opportunity to get creative with how you want to appear to your friends, family or colleagues.
While you’re setting up your contact poster, you can also make changes to your Apple ID avatar based on the poster. If you go into Settings on your iPhone or Mac, for example, you’ll see that your profile picture can be changed to match whatever you’ve set as your Contact Poster, whether it’s a new picture you’ve taken or a particular Memoji. .
At this time, you must be running the iOS 17 public beta to take advantage of the contact banners feature. It should be available on all supported iPhones when the full version of iOS 17 is released later in 2023.
To find the contact poster settings in iOS 17:
- Open the Contacts app on your iPhone.
- Tap your name at the top of the contact list.
- Choose Contact photo and poster.
What you’ll see first are your Contact Poster options: the first and last name you’d like to use, whether you’d like to share your name and photo, and whether you’d like to automatically share your posters with all your contacts or whether you’d like iOS to ask you every time that you call someone who is in your contact list.
Now is your chance to get creative in terms of what other people see when you call them.
To create a new contact poster:
- Tap Editso he + (plus) symbol. If you swipe right, there is also a Create new option on the far right of your existing contact banners that you can use instead.
- At the bottom of the screen, select Camera (a new photo), Photos (an existing photo), memojieither Monogram (text) to select the type of contact poster you want to create.
When you use Camera or Photos to create a new Contact Poster:
- Take a new photo or choose one from your library.
- Swipe left or right or move between image and font styles.
- Tap the color swab (bottom right) to change the color of any effect.
- Pinch the photo in or out to zoom and crop.
- Tap the text at the top to change the font style, weight, and color.
When you use Memoji to create a new contact poster:
- Choose a Memoji from the popup or tap + (plus) to create a new one.
- Once you’ve created your new Memoji or created a variation of an existing one, you can tap the camera icon for an expression of your own and save it.
- On the next screen, you can tap the color swab (bottom left) to choose a background color, or change the Memoji image (and keep the expression) by tapping the icon in the bottom right.
- Tap the text at the top to change the font style, weight, and color.
When you use Monogram to create a new contact poster:
- Tap the color swab (bottom left) to choose a background color.
- Tap the text at the top to change the font style, weight, and color.
- Tap the letter(s) in the bottom right to change the large letters in the center of the poster. You can specify one or two characters (for example, your initials).
Regardless of the type of contact poster you’re creating, tap Made when you’re happy, and then Continue on the preview screen.
You can then choose to use your new Contact Poster to also update your primary contact photo, the one used for your Apple ID on your devices and in other people’s contact lists. Tap Hop if you don’t want to do this or Update if you do and you are happy with the contact photo image that was generated from your contact poster, it will be displayed on the screen. if you touch Hop either Updateyou will return to the screen you saw when you first pressed Contact photo and posterand your new contact poster is established.
You can also select customize photo (which is under the Update button) if you want to update your contact photo but don’t want something based on the contact poster you just made. You again have the same four options as before: Camera, Photos, memojiand Monogram – further smileys. In other words, you could have a Monogram contact poster but an emoji contact photo or a Memoji contact poster but a real-life image for your contact photo.
Once this is done, your details are modified in Contacts and your new Contact Poster is established. To toggle between the different contact banners you’ve created and customize them:
- Go back to Contacts, touch your name, then choose Contact photo and poster.
- Tap Edit again.
- Swipe left or right to choose your current contact poster, or personalize to edit one.
once you choose personalizethen you can choose contact photo either Poster, and it will return to the screens we already saw. To delete a contact poster, swipe up on it, then tap the red trash can icon that appears.
It’s worth mentioning that contact banners work seamlessly with another new feature in iOS 17, NameDrop. NameDrop is meant to be a faster and easier way to exchange contact information with someone: hold your iPhone close to someone else’s iPhone or Apple Watch and, assuming both devices have Bluetooth enabled, you should get a message asking if you want to transfer your contact. details.
This message displays the Contact Poster that you have set as your default, and of course, once the contact information is shared, your Contact Poster also appears on the other person’s iPhone. However, as of this writing, NameDrop had not appeared in the iOS 17 public beta, so we’ll have to wait and see how the details work out.
