Nokia 6300, iSync, and Contact Photos…

August 19th, 2007

Thanks to the following links, I was able to get my new Nokia 6300 to successfully sync with my Mac’s Address Book via iSync:

Unfortunately, two things didn’t sync up: Birthdays and Contact Photos. After politely asking people if there was any way to get these to work (especially photos, as it’s nice to see someone’s picture pop up on the phone for faster recognition before you unceremoniously reject them) I tried to tackle this one on my own. I was able to dig around in the plist files of the Nokia N93 and glean the few lines that make both of these details available to the Nokia 6300 plugin.

Before we begin however, I’ve noticed some problems that can occur with Photo syncing. PLEASE READ THIS THOROUGHLY before continuing: it’ll save some head-banging and frustration later.

Failing to follow the following guidelines will result in a completely failed sync. Should this happen, I simply deleted all of my contacts on the phone (phone memory, not SIM card), tried to determine the problem, and tried again.

Also, note that if you do end up deleting all of the contacts on your phone, you’ll also lose your 1-touch dialing and the entries in your caller groups (but not the groups themselves).

Here we go:

  1. Do not use .GIF files — JPG only! (I didn’t test PNG)
  2. You cannot drag-and-drop from a web-page directly onto a contact. Although this works for Address Book in that you’ll see the ‘image edit’ window pop-open, and you can save your contact, when it comes to iSync your entire sync will fail. If you want to use someone’s image (from Facebook, for example) simply drag the photo you want from the web-page onto your desktop, and then drag the photo from your desktop onto the Address Book entry’s ‘contact photo’ area. You’re then free to delete the image from your desktop.
  3. You cannot sync with a ’smart group’ that you created within Address Book. This has more to do with iSync than the new plugin, but it’s a pain nonetheless. Physical groups only!
  4. When a sync fails, you are not told what failed, or why it failed. iSync detailed logs are useless too, stating only:

    5:28:24 PM Error [Nokia 6300] An unexpected error occured.
    5:28:24 PM Error Device "Nokia 6300" synchronization failed

    Fun! What I did was create a ‘temp’ group, set iSync to sync with that folder only for contacts, and then slowly add contacts into that temp group until a failure occurred so that I knew what the offending entry was.

The plugin that I’ve created is essentially just the one from the site listed above, but with some additional properties put into the PhoneContuit.plist and SyncEngine.plist files.

As with everyone else, I take no responsibility if this completely fcks up your phone or Address Book, but please do backup both your Address Book (File -> Back Up Address Book…) and your phone’s contacts (I typically just copy everything to SIM). I can say that this has worked fine for me for a day now, with a fair bit of testing. After I cleaned up my offending image-entries, it’s been great.

To install: Quit iSync, download the following zip file, and drag-and-drop the plugin into your system using the shortcut, and sync away.


Nokia 6300 iSync Plugin With Photos

Good luck, let me know how it goes in the comments!

Rummy.

Posted by rums
Filed in Apple

35 Responses to “Nokia 6300, iSync, and Contact Photos…”

  1. richard hanmer Says:
    August 20th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    I tired it but iSync said an error message along the lines of “there is a plugin which won’t work. Click here to remove it.”

  2. richard hanmer Says:
    August 20th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

    I’ve always dumped images or photos to the desktop before putting them in the mac address book. As you say - this should prevent them being stored as Gif files. Is there anyway of determining the file type of the images in Address book so I can weed out the Gifs. If you drag an image from teh address book to the desktop it shows them as Tiff files.

  3. richard hanmer Says:
    August 20th, 2007 at 2:48 pm

    Here’s what error message was

    http://picasaweb.google.com/richard.hanmer/Nokia6300?authkey=HsBKrzYt0JI

  4. richard hanmer Says:
    August 20th, 2007 at 2:49 pm

    here’s what the iSync error message displayed on opening iSync

  5. richard hanmer Says:
    August 20th, 2007 at 2:50 pm

    here’s the error message shown on opening iSync

  6. rums Says:
    August 22nd, 2007 at 10:35 am

    @Richard:

    Were you able to get one of the plugins from those first four links I posted working? If not, please check those pages out as they are full of tips on getting that initial sync working. After you’ve gotten that, then try my version of the plugin.

    With regards to .gif files in your Address Book, you know that’s a heck of a question. I’ll try to do some digging around. For me, none of my contacts had photos up until a few days ago so I knew exactly which ones were gifs because I remembered the source of the photos. I’m not sure if it’s possible to check after the fact, but I’ll try.

  7. Ian Heffernan Says:
    August 22nd, 2007 at 8:57 pm

    Cheers Rummy, seems to sync the photos fine but I was realy looking for a way to sync the birthdays as I’m forever getting in a world of trouble for forgetting! I thought your plugin was able to do this, am I doing something wrong? Any help gratefully received. Cheers.

  8. rums Says:
    August 22nd, 2007 at 10:41 pm

    @Ian:

    Hmm…birthday’s shoud’ve worked for you as they do work fine for me.

    As a test, I added a birthday to a user in my Address Book, opened up iCal and verified that it automatically showed up under my ‘Birthdays’ calendar, did a sync, and boom it was on my phone’s Calendar (as well as the contact’s details).

    Under you iSync settings for your phone, are you syncing all calendars, or just specific ones? If it’s the latter, ensure you have your Birthdays calendar selected and give it a shot.

    Let me know how it goes.

  9. Ian Heffernan Says:
    August 24th, 2007 at 4:18 am

    Rummy

    Class, it works. Cheers yr a star. No excuse for forgetting the birthdays now!

  10. Phil Says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 12:49 pm

    Hi.
    My meetings are shifted to be two hours earlier. How does this happen? Do I have to do something to my phone prior to sync???

    It did not happen with the older version of the plugin I found somewhere else…

    Thanks,
    Phil

  11. Felix Pring Says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 9:25 pm

    I purchased my first Mac a few weeks ago and I’m such a beginner I’ve have been struggling to find things like text editors and ‘where did that file go I just imported’.
    I upgraded my Nokia 6100 to a 6300 at about the same time and had to go through a huge rigmarole just to transfer my contacts and calender (After several calls to Nokia Support; via an IrDA USB from eBay, syncing with MS Outlook - which I’ve never used and syncing back again to the 6300 all on my ugly PC running XP ☹).

    Then just now, I nervously downloaded your plugin, followed the few simple easy directions and hey presto! my pristine Mac has a well populated address book and calender (including birthdays).

    Thank you very much indeed!

  12. rums Says:
    August 30th, 2007 at 10:24 am

    @Richard: I’ve looked at the source data for Address Book and I can’t seem to figure out which images were originally gifs or which were jpeg.

    @Phil: Hmm…I’m really not too sure. As it is based on the other plugin that is widely available, there should not be any difference. Sorry I’m not more help than that, but perhaps investigate the comments on the other blogs to see if they’ve run into the same issue.

    @Felix: You’re most welcome! Glad it worked easily for you.

  13. Maki Says:
    September 1st, 2007 at 6:52 pm

    Hi rummy,
    re: sync of the B’day calendar entries.
    I have already installed the earlier plugin that yours is derived from - what’s the impact of installing your modified one on top of what’s currently in place, so that I can get b’days working?
    Perhaps its better if I just add the appropriate entry to enable this, could you please lemme know which file I should do a compare on to find the b’day cal change?
    thanks for this btw its really helpful.
    Maki

  14. rums Says:
    September 2nd, 2007 at 9:16 pm

    @Maki: The impact is that birthdays / photos could work, or it could stop your sync from working alltogether due to pad contact photos. To test it out, just rename your existing folder to .old or something, install this one, and test away. Don’t forget to quit-and-restart iSync for the changes to take effect.

    The files I’ve edited are: PhoneConduit.plist and SyncEngine.plist

    If you do a diff on them or just look in them, you’ll notice the differences (hint: do a search on the words ‘birthday’ and ‘photo’ in each of those two files)

    Good luck!
    Rummy.

  15. Pedro Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 11:41 am

    Hi rums.

    I am just not getting it.

    I managed to use the information on your fourth link to change the .plist code in order to sinc my NOK6300 to my MacBook, however, when I tryed any of the links, they failed and the iSync would not open.

    Please forgive my dumness, but I went through all the explanations on the other blogs comments and still am blank for a soluttion. If you can help in any way, please…

  16. Pedro Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 11:46 am

    This is the mesage I get:

    “iSync can’t open because of a with a plug-in.

    The following plug-in doesn’t work with this version of iSync. Click the arrow to show the plug-in, move or delete it, and then open iSync again.

    ˙ Nokia6300.phoneplugin”

    By the way, I do have iSync 2.4

    Thank you very much
    Pedro

  17. rums Says:
    September 14th, 2007 at 7:21 pm

    @Phil: That’s really bizzare. Who’s version of the plugin did you download? Mine? Or one of the other ones? I am also running 2.4 (501.2).

    When you say “tried any of the links”, what do you mean?

    The only suggestion I have right now is to quit iSync, delete all copies of your existing Nokia6300.plugin, download my version, drag-and-drop to install, and start iSync again. Add the device and see what happens.

  18. Maki Says:
    September 16th, 2007 at 4:08 pm

    If you’re having issues with Calendar event hours sync’d incorrectly from iCal -> 6300, I think this can be corrected by modifying the following setting to a value of false:
    hasTimeZone

    Inside the following file:
    PhonePlugins/Nokia6300.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/MetaClasses.plist

    If the setting has the value of true, then my iCal events appear with a GMT time difference on my handset when the event was created in iCal (it appears fine when created on the handset). You can avoid this by either changing your events as belonging to a “floating” time zone in iCal (enable Time zone support first in Advanced prefs).. or by modifying this setting. I wish I discovered this difference in the MetaClasses file first, would have saved me changing all my events to floating!

    Maki

  19. Oliver Says:
    September 17th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

    Thanks a lot for your plugin. works almost perfect for my some hundred contacts. Almost means I had one contact with an image problem. It was a very small image, 127×127 pixel, generated by my old nokia 7650, synced to my mac, and now synced back to the 6300. The image type tiff does not seem to do any harm, but I had to enlarge the image to 256×256 to make it work.

    Maybe this helps somebody, who has the same problem, or have swithed from 7650 to6300, too 8-)

    Oliver

  20. tony. Says:
    September 17th, 2007 at 10:30 pm

    I get the same error as Pedro, and I’m using iSync Version 2.4 (501.2), too. Any thoughts?

    Thanx!

  21. Oliver Says:
    September 19th, 2007 at 3:24 am

    @toni and Pedro:

    I had the same problem. It was caused by the changes made _inside_ the iSync package to support the 6300, described on another web page.

    I solved it by restoring the initial state of the iSync package.

    By the way, I do have a time zone problem, too. I will try the hint from Maki.

  22. Oliver Says:
    September 19th, 2007 at 3:22 pm

    @toni and pedro: hasTimeZone works in my confguration.

    Thanks a lot to all who helped!

    Oliver

  23. Jex Says:
    October 7th, 2007 at 1:52 am

    G’day Rums,

    Thanks for all your work on the plug-in, my nokia 6300 is synching beautifully with my MacBook :D

    As I have just purchased this laptop and ported my contacts across from my PC, none of them had any profile pictures. I added one (following your instructions - .jpg only + via the desktop) but the next synch crashed the phone instantly.

    After restarting the phone and removing the picture from the contact, the next synch worked fine (including birthdays!)

    Any ideas…?

    cheers

    Jex

  24. Zeev Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 11:25 am

    Does this work also with Nokia 6288?
    I look on the Nokia6288.phoneplugin and the files PhoneConduit.plist and SyncEngine.plist aren’t there…. at all…

  25. Jordi Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 5:37 am

    Hi! Awesome plugin!
    I have been testing it for a while.
    But it seems that when
    I create a contact with image on my mac.
    I sync. All ok
    I modify the contact phone number on osx
    I sync: Nokia 6300 resets (not a full reset only white screen and go to front screen)
    Then osx says sync failed.
    But in osx adress book apear the two numbers the old and the new, in the same contact.
    I erase the photo from osx adress book, and the old phone number.
    I sync. All ok

    So it seems that when I try to modify a photo contact the phone hangs a little.

  26. Steffen Says:
    December 21st, 2007 at 7:26 am

    Thanks for your work. I just installed the plugin (Leopard) and it works. Before, iSync refused connecting to my Nokia 6300 stating “Phone not supported”. When I restarted iSync after the installation of your plugin, it worked right from the start without any further configuration changes necessary.

    Thanks again

    Steffen

  27. Angelo Says:
    January 6th, 2008 at 6:35 am

    Thanks for the plugin and it works perfectly in Tiger, but not so good in Leopard. Near the end my phone seems to reboot and iSync gives the following errormsg: [Nokia 6300] There was an error pushing some changes to the phone. The synchronization may have been canceled on the phone.
    Device “Nokia 6300” synchronization failed.

    Kind regards, Angelo

  28. Kevin Nordmand Says:
    February 7th, 2008 at 6:32 pm

    Thanks man! - I’ve had my Nokia 6300 laying arround for 4 months now because i couldent sync it! - Your app worked perfectly!

  29. Nokia 6300 Says:
    February 19th, 2008 at 10:55 pm

    […] dabgotra.com: Nokia 6300, iSync, and Contact Photos… […]

  30. Bob Says:
    February 20th, 2008 at 3:51 am

    Very Nice! Thanks!

  31. MWpulse Says:
    March 25th, 2008 at 9:49 am

    Hi, I am having problems with syncing my phone to my computer and/or vice versa. I can sync my calendars, that aint a problem. But then when i select the contacts it just cant do it. i have tried deleting the phone, and resetting it. also deleting it from bluetooth itself and reinstalling the phone using the wizard. all to no avail. I started using the “send this card” function in address book, but there is an easier way, called isync…it dont work though. any help greatly appreciated. Im not using contact images. I havent gotten round to taking the pics for that lol. Any ideas??
    Pete

  32. Online Pharmacies Says:
    April 19th, 2008 at 3:03 am

    Nice Site! Thanks!

  33. John Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 6:11 am

    Hi there,
    thanks for this post, but the plugin won’t work for me. iSync refuses to open with this plugin in the plugins folder.
    I’m using Leopard and iSync version 3.

    From this page, I managed to get address book and calendar syncing working fine.
    just the birthdays don’t sync right. it does at least add them to the calendar, but not to the contact itself.
    pictures don’t sync either, but that’s not important.

    John

  34. John Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 6:13 am

    with “this page” I meant this page:
    http://klauskjeldsen.dk/2007/04/20/how-to-isync-a-nokia-6300-on-mac-os-x/

  35. John Andrew Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 7:17 am

    Hey guys! I got the birthdays to work just fine now. the following page is in german, but you should find your way around:
    http://www.macuser.de/forum/showthread.php?t=256320

    go to the post from “idrops” on April 7 and add the birthday string as indicated after “SyncEngine-series40.plist”.

    This must be done in the following file:
    Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/PhoneFamilySync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/PhoneConduitv2-series40.plist

    This may not work with the an extra plugin. It does however work if you hack isync’s property lists yourself, as you can find in other posts.

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