The user photo story in Office 365 is not so straight forward. Photos are stored in Active Directory (AD) on-premises, Azure Active Directory (AAD), Exchange Online (EXO), SharePoint Online (SPO), and at first appearances possibly elsewhere as well (where does my Delve profile picture live, what about my Skype for Business (SfB) avatar?).
I have put together a flow diagram to represent how this actually works. It aims to demonstrate where user photos are stored and where different applications fetch user photos from (if they don’t store the images), and leads to some recommendations about user photo synchronisation.
Please note the date of this article (August 2016) and be conscious that Office 365 is changing rapidly and the following recommendations may have changed (e.g. Prior to the Delve user profile page, the SharePoint user profile page referenced images stored in SharePoint rather than Exchange. Changes such as these will continue to evolve).
User photos: the diagram
Where applications store and fetch user photos
|
Photo Location |
Comments |
Size |
Is source? |
|
On-premises AD DS in the thumbnailPhoto attribute |
100Kb maximum |
Recommended to be 96×96 or 48×48 |
Yes |
|
Azure AD in the thumbnailPhoto attribute |
100Kb maximum Usually synced from AD DS via Azure AD Connect |
Recommended to be 96×96 or 48×48 |
No. Sync from AD |
|
Exchange Online as property of the mailbox |
500Kb Provided manually by users or a bulk import can be scripted if source photos can be located and named appropriately. If not provided, Exchange will reference the AAD thumbnailPhoto in some instances but only if the thumbnailPhoto is less than 10Kb. Does not sync back to AD |
Recommended to be 648×648 |
Yes |
|
SharePoint Online ‘User Photos’ library |
Three renditions of the EXO photo are automatically created in SharePoint after upload to EXO. It generally takes up to 72 hours to see changes to EXO photo here. Sometimes we see that a user must ‘touch’ their profile before the sync will be performed. NOTE: Updating user profile photo via Delve profile is actually updating EXO profile photo and not performing any actions directly in SharePoint Online. |
Small is 48 x 48, Medium is 72 x 72, Large changes depending on the source image but is always square. I have seen as small as 120 x 120 and as large as 300 x 300. PnP image upload solution uploads these as 200 x 200. |
No. Sync from EXO |
|
Skype for Business |
Does not store any images Uses the high resolution Exchange image if available, otherwise uses the AD thumbnailPhoto |
EXO image or AD thumbnailPhoto |
No. Read from EXO |
|
Delve user profile |
Does not store any images Uses the high resolution Exchange image if available, otherwise uses the AD thumbnailPhoto |
EXO image or AD thumbnailPhoto |
No. Read from EXO |
|
Yammer |
Also stores its own photo. Out of scope of this discussion for now. |
Yes |
Likely issues and resolutions
|
Issue |
Resolution |
|
Exchange Online user photo is low quality (and in turn so is the SPO photo and SfB photo) |
The source image coming from AD was/is low quality. EXO user photos can be updated by users individually or if high res source photos are available this import can be scripted. Source images should be jpg of 648×648 (resizing and compression can also be scripted) |
|
Exchange Online user photo is high quality but SfB photo is low quality |
High resolution photos from Exchange will be used as long as both Exchange and Sfb/Lync are of new enough versions (2013 or greater) and SfB is configured to allow all photos (not just those from AD). NB. If a user doesn’t have a mailbox (e.g. not licenced) then they will be displayed using the AD photo |
|
There is no Exchange Online user photo (and in turn there is no SPO photo or SfB photo) |
A photo has not been imported to the user’s EXO mailbox and the AAD thumbnailPhoto either doesn’t not contain an image or that image is greater than 10Kb. Import of photos up to 500Kb to EXO mailbox can be scripted (the source images could be on a file share, or AAD). |
|
Changes to user photos are reflected quickly in Exchange and Skype but take days to replicate to SPO |
Exchange to SPO synchronisation is a periodic process and can take up to 72 hours. A custom solution can perform this replication on demand (e.g. at the same time EXO user photos are set) |
|
User photos changed in other systems which update AD are not reflected in EXO, SPO, SfB. E.g. A user in an on-premises SharePoint farm updates their user photo |
When AD is updated, it is synchronised with AAD but that is as far as it gets as the “sync” from AAD to EXO is one-off import rather than a Sync. Unlikely to be desirable to create a custom sync relationship here as users will want to be able to update EXO directly and won’t want their photo’s overwritten |
|
User photos updated in EXO aren’t replicated to other systems which share an AD. E.g. An on-premises SharePoint farm |
The user photo in EXO is not synched back to AD – it can’t be consistently as the AD thumbnailPhoto attribute only supports photos up to 100Kb where EXO supports larger images. Potential for a custom solution to sync images back to AD after having resized/compressed them to <100kb – However general recommendation is that AD thumbnailPhoto optimal size is 10Kb and 96×96. |
Recommendations
Use Exchange user photos as the master. Allow users to update their user photos but pre-populate their user photo if possible and before end users are provided any access to the system.
If high resolution photos are available, script import of high resolution photos (648×648) to Exchange Online (see Set-UserPhoto and this and sample script below). These will then be visible in Exchange, in Skype, and, once processed, in SharePoint Online. In a dispersed environment this may have to be managed by many teams rather than trying to compile a single list of all user photos.
Users may then update their user profile photo directly via Outlook or indirectly via their Delve profile.
If synchronisation back to AD is required in order serve other applications (e.g. an on-premises SharePoint farm) then a custom solution could provide synchronisation from EXO to AD but this process should compress and shrink images as the recommended size of thumbnailPhoto images is only 96×96 and 10Kb.
Sample usage of the Set-UserPhoto cmdlet
Paul.