Help Android deleted my associated contact photos

[GoogleHeadache]

Can anyone hazard why exquisitely defective Android recently deleted most (though curiously not all) of the photos I had painstakingly assigned to my contacts, or for that matter, why fascistic google insists on substituting gmail photos for the ones I picked for contacts with gmail addresses?

 

[Crashdamage]

Did you merge different contact lists? Sync contacts on a previously unsynced device? I don't know what to make of this...

To Google's credit, you can restore your contacts to any point in the last 30 days here:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1069522?hl=en