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If a contact has no photo, offer the option to get the picture from Gravatar, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo Pulse and other sites, and save it locally to a predefined location with just a single click.
If a contact has multiple emails, try them all until a site responds with a picture (or more) for the contact.
If all fail, use a distinguished default photo to indicate that you have searched for a photo on all social networks and none has been found.
An additional optional feature would be to periodically check if the picture has been updated on the originating site.

What you are really advocating here is some type of 'search out & merge' capability. It's a good idea, but there are a lot of randoms to it. for instance, what sites will be searched? In searching, what databases will be accessed? and does the searcher have to have access permission to search? (ie.. an account?)

Well I guess you could generalize it by letting the user to create data sources for certain information types.

Somewhere in settings I would define the following data sources:

Example 1:
Datasource Name: Pictures from Gravatar
InfoType: KAddressBook Photo
Type: IMG
Command: wget (or any script)
Parameters: http://www.gravatar.com/%%%EMAIL-ADDRESS%%%


Example 2:
Datasource Name: Home phone from whitepages.com
InfoType: KAddressBook Home Phone
Type: JSON
Command: wget
Parameters: http://www.wp-api.com/%%%FIRSTNAME%%%+%%%LASTNAME%%%%


.... later, while viewing a contact called Tina Turner I would like to see buttons like [Get Pictures from Gravatar] and [Home phone from whitepages.com]

We should add Google+, Google Latitude and other Google datasources.

We've basically built all the infrastructure for this already.
We have a system that takes all contact info from all sources (all Akonadi contat sources, including G+ and Facebook providers) and IM accounts and everything and merges everything into a single "person".

When apps query for a single contact based on their local ID, it then fetches all information on that person from all datasources.
https://projects.kde.org/projects/playg ... libkpeople

Internally this is just a small MySQLLte table matching a person ID to multiple source IDs. A range of plugins then fetch all the relevant data and provide actions.

So far the only app using this is KDE Telepathy; but we have prototypes in kmail. The issue right now is timing due to the KF5 porting, we're rather feature frozen.

Adding a gravatar backend should be relatively easy if someone wants to do it.