How many contacts can be added to the address book?

How can I resize my contacts picture size so my whole address book stays under the iCloud recommended 24Mb size limit?

• I have a huge address book with many contact pictures that have stopped showing up since migrating to iCloud. Recently, Apple added some explanations on the limits over which iCloud address book sync would not work, say, "optimally" - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4489 There is an average 25.000 contacts limit (I am far from it) and an overall 24 MB size limit for contacts and contact pictures. Turns out that in my Library/Application Support/AddresBook folder there is an Images folder that contains both JPEGs and untyped image files (that preview is still able to display) with several duplicates and some very large ones (mostly the high res pictures that I dropped onto AddressBook.app from the web - I prefer high res and figured out that the app would do the resizing job). The total is close to 200MB This never rose any issue as long as I was syncing locally, but it seems now to be the reason why iCloud fails synchronizing my address book. I also tried Automator (but the non jpeg files cannot be processed as images) and AppleScript (but there is for some strange reason no Dictionary for Preview) What I would like to do would be to resize all those images to 256x256 or even smaller without changing their name or type. Another way would be to design a process that, for each contact with a contact picture, shrinks such picture before re-adding it.

• Answer:

  I followed @JeromeColas advice to try to export the whole address book as a vCard and then reimport it and could shrink a 250MB+ archive down to 42 MB, which is still way above the 24MB limit. So in my case it will not work, but might be helpful to others.