3 min readHow to import Office365 User photos over 10KB & without CSV in bulk?

Published Date:

October 24, 2015

Share

Updating user photos in their profile is much important as it helps
users to get a good Credibility, Recognition and to brand themselves in
Social media such as Yammer or within their organization.

There are cases that users will not have professional photo updated or
there is a business policy which enforces users to have professional
images updated. Either the case, Admin has to take care in enforcing
this. Also there exists limitation for the user photo not to be more
than 10 KB.

In this blog, we are going to explore how to add user photo more than
10KB size and in bulk. The steps involved are

Remove the 10KB photo size limitation
Prepare a folder with all users photo
Update the profile photo

The user photos can be viewed in below locations:

Outlook Web Access
Contact Card
Thumbnail in emails
Outlook Client
Yammer
Lync Client
SharePoint (People Search / Newsfeed)

The complexity raises here is that the photos updated through SharePoint
will not be reflected immediately in SharePoint search results and in
Outlook client. Vice versa, if the user updated his photo from OWA
Lync it will not reflect in SharePoint immediately. This is because the
images are cached in all systems and it takes time to update it.

The only way to manage this centrally is by using the PowerShell.

1. Remove the 10KB photo size limitation

Install SharePoint Online Management Shell and connect to exchange using
below cmdlet

$UserCredential = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/?proxyMethod=RPS -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

Note: To overwrite the limitation of uploading the images with size
more than 10KB, you need to use different proxy method
(/?proxyMethod=RPS ) to connect your Office 365 in above cmdlet.

2. Prepare a folder with all users photo
Prepare a folder with all Office365 users photo with their username as
the filename.

3. Update the profile photo

Now we need to encode photo data in to a variable and use it in
Set-UserPhoto cmdlet.

$path= 'C:User images'
$Images = Get-ChildItem $path
$Images |Foreach-Object{
$Identity = ($_.Name.Tostring() -split ".")[0]
$PictureData = $path+$_.name
Set-UserPhoto -Identity $Identity -PictureData ([System.IO.File]::ReadAllBytes($PictureData)) -Confirm:$false }

Note: To use the above cmdlet you need to create a folder with user
images and rename each images with its Office 365 user name.

Below are the limitation in Office365 user photo update

By default, images with size 10 kb alone can be uploaded. Admin has

to depend on other tools to edit (Crop, Rotate or Enhance) the user

images.
GUI for centralize management is not possible. Entirely depends

PowerShell script which is complex to use.
Need to create user images with user name and execute PowerShell

which is a time consuming process and more reviews needed to ensure

accuracy.
Images uploaded will not be reflected in all systems immediately.

To overcome the above obstacles and make photo collection process
easier you can use ‘GingerEx for Office 365 Photo Edit’.