After being fed up with multiple entries (phone/google/facebook, etc) for each person, I spent a whole day updating everything into my google contacts. I basically deleted all the ones called "phone". So now, when I make any changes through the phone, it updates my google contacts, picture and all. Now I have them all in one place, phone crashes (if ever) be damned!
It was a pain in the ass, since nothing seems to truly sync it all into one platform, so I had to do it all manually. But in the end it was worth it. It's so much cleaner and easier to deal with now.