[@nativescript/contacts] loading large amount of contacts with image is very slow

I'm making an app where I need the contact list from the phone, including images.

I'm using @nativescript/contacts and Contacts.getAllContacts(['name', 'phoneNumbers', 'photo']).

This is painfully slow to load, especially on iPhones, when the number of contacts grows. 500 contacts with image can easily take 10-20 seconds to load depending on the device. If I remove the request for photo it becomes blazingly fast again.

Do you have any good tips on how to load the images in a faster manner?

This was first mentioned on Discord where @triniwiz indicated that there might be a way to fix this by re-writing a part of the plugin code, hence this ticket (no pressure 😄)