| Seeing as your first post was quite a while ago, I have no idea if this will help.
I have not had your exact problem with the contact pictures, but my iPhone 1.1.1 update completely wiped out my phone and forced me to do a restore, even though I hadn't hacked it ... and I lost all of my pictures I had taken. I guess the moral of the story is *always* sync your phone before you do an update.
Now, on to extracting your contact images from the backup file:
1) Navigate in the Finder to the Address Book backup file that contains the contact images you want to extract.
2) Right click and choose "Show Package Contents"
3) Drag the entire "Images" folder onto the desktop.
4) In this images folder there should be a bunch of files that look like serial numbers. Add the extension ".tiff" to the end of each one of these and you can now open them in Preview and drag them onto your current Address Book window to update your contact images. |