The invention provides a contact photo providing method, which comprises that: a contact photo management platform receives a request message of acquiring a contact photo from a user terminal, wherein the request message comprises the text attribute information of a contact; the contact photo management platform performs matching to obtain a tag of a contact photo picture according to the text attribute information in the request message; and the contact photo management platform determines the contact photo picture according to the matched tag, and transmits the contact photo picture to the user terminal. Simultaneously, the invention also provides the contact photo management platform and the user terminal. By the embodiment of the invention, a user can obtain the photo picture related to the contact according to the text attribute information of the contact, and information indicating that the contact does not have any photo is not required to be displayed in a contact list, so the method, the platform and the user terminal are more personalized in use, good in user experiences and favorable for the popularization of network address book services.