This question and its answers seem like a case of the question not being clear about the full context, and so several answerers assume things about the context.
Since it’s actually a sex partner, who already had a photo of her on his old phone, not just someone with only text contact, it seems more reasonable to me than most answers here assumed, to be interested in a picture, and expect it to be a reasonable request.
Also, even without that, it seems pretty clear that this is someone who got a new phone and didn’t “import their contacts” from the old phone/account, for whatever reason. While it may be common for people to import their contacts, there are various reasonable reasons why someone might not have done that. I have had technically competent/skilled and very intelligent friends who have had to get new phones and not been able to recover all their old contact details, and sent out requests to resupply them with contact info.
To answer the title question: There are many possible reasons. To include a few:
* Their new phone company doesn’t have access to the old phone company’s contact info.
* They said no or somehow skipped the import contacts option during phone setup.
* A technical issue happened when trying to import contacts.
* While learning their new phone, they messed up and/or haven’t been able to figure out how to import old contacts.
* They don’t know/understand about importing contacts (I know a senior software engineer who has trouble with this).
* It could also be a deliberate choice to start a new device without importing, wanting to only have current and relevant people in the phone, rather than needing to find and delete older contacts in order to clean it up.
As for: “Ok but all I’m asking is would you yourself need that if you have a new phone? It’s not a stranger just a contact but you have to add back. The person already had photo of me so it was no big deal. They just got new phone and had no numbers.”
– I probably wouldn’t, but I might.