iMessage and multiple Apple Ids

I had an issue that my iPhone was sending receiving iMessages, that my other Apple devices weren't getting, and visa versa.

What I found is that on the iPhone iOS 7 I was signed into the other Apple Id I have, and no matter trying to add the first Id would seem to fix it - as it was asking to verify my first email address, but I couldn't get it to send a verification email.

What I then did was log out of iMessage and log back in with my first apple Id. Enabled a second email address and my phone number, and set all new messages to come from my phone number. And made sure could receive from both email addresses.

In doing so I got pop ups on my other apple devices, which I okayed.

Eventually the first apple id / email address now gave me extra options on my MacBook Pro, and I could set it to the phone number, and enable all my email addresses to associate with it. Same thing on my other apple devices. Problem resolved.

How to get photos to appear in iMessage?

There seems to be a bug with my iMessage on my Mac that virtually all the avatar / profile pics had disappeared. Discussing with the genius, we thought that getting rid of the contacts in the address book might resolve it - as possibly a reboot. He left me to manually remove all the duplicates whilst he went on to help other people - but he was happy for me to stay and do this. After removing the duplicates and rebooting the photos did not appear. The Genius was busy at this point. So I was playing around, and then I thought I’d try opening the photos in the address book and re-saving them. This was a master stroke, as the photos suddenly appeared in iMessage. So it was just a case of going through and re-saving all the photos in Contacts and this resolved the problem. Well almost; one message thread still didn’t contain photos when I opened the thread. But scrolling up and scrolling back down the pictures reappeared. So that is kind of a workaround for now, until Apple fix this.