Options for SharePoint User Profile Properties and Photos

As I’ve mentioned, most of these blogs are for my own benefit. My memory isn’t as good as it once was… has something to do with years gone by and only limited space.   It is what it is..

My customer is working through a migration from Wave 14 (Exchange 2010, Lync 2010, and SharePoint 2010) to Wave 15 (Exchange 2013, Lync 2013, and SharePoint 2013) and the topic of user photos came up. There are a variety of ways to handle this from a technical, philosophical, and legal perspective, but being who I am we’ll stick to technical for now.

I set up a variety of procedures in my lab and jotted down some notes about the results. Keeping in mind that my focus currently is SharePoint, I’m not discussing Lync 2013 and the only reason I’m discussing Exchange 2013 at all is due to the new integration point that allows the use of high resolution photos. The gist of what I found is below and keep in mind that some of these scenarios are highly unlikely.

• SP2013 with no connection to User Profile Service App (UPSA)
  • Photo is stored anywhere and the user has a property called “Picture” that stores a URL to the photo in the user’s ListItem for the User Information List (_catalog/users) in the content database

• • User has a menu to “My Settings” which redirects to _layouts/15/Userdisp.aspx which allows editing of the user profile properties

• SP2013 with connection to UPSA, but no MySite/Personal Site and no Active Directory Synchronization (highly unlikely)
  •      
  • Profiles can be manually created in UPSA (or through custom code) and synchronized into the User Information list of each content database via timer jobs
  • Profile properties are editable only through the UPSA (or through custom code)
  • Photos cannot be stored in any ‘out of the box’ method as there is no OOB option for uploading the photos. When attempting to upload a photo through the UPSA, it will error as there is no MySite host Url defined

• SP2013 with UPSA with AD Sync, but without personal site and MySite
  • This scenario is again unlikely since without the MySite experience there is nowhere to store the photo without a custom coded solution.
  • This scenario does, however, provide us with the ability to synchronize user profile information from AD. Normally low-res photos are stored within the thumbnailPhoto, but again SharePoint has nowhere to store the photo out of the box.   

• SP2013 with UPSA with personal site and MySite, but no AD Sync
  • User menu changes to “About Me”  (https://<mysite>/person.aspx) instead of “My Settings”

• • After you are on the “About Me” page, clicking “Edit Profile” redirects the user to EditProfile.aspx where properties can be edited and then synchronized from the User Profile database to the content databases and by the SweepSync timer job mentioned above
  • The photo in this scenario is actually stored in the MySite host under a new picture library called “User Photos”

• SP2013 with full UPSA and sync with AD
  • This blog (one of many that are out there) has steps on implementing this:

https://sharepointadam.com/2010/11/18/import-user-profile-photos-from-active-directory-into-sharepoint-2010/

• • Basically you are configuring a mapping of the SharePoint property Picture to the Active Directory attribute thumbnailPhoto. This can be configured either as ‘import’ – synchronize from AD to SharePoint – or as ‘export’ – synchronize from SharePoint to AD. After running a profile sync, then you run a powershell cmdlet (Update-SPProfilePhotoStore) to pull the photos and create a photo store within the MySite host (https://<my site url>/user%20photos). 

• SP2013 photo sync with new Exchange High-Res Photo option
  • *requirement – App Management Service App Proxy in order to create the App Principal that is needed to interact with EWS
  • Photo stored in Exchange mailbox and requested from SharePoint when needed
  • It is also stored as a caching mechanism within the “User Photos” library of the MySite site collection
  • When adding the photo to Exchange (Set-UserPhoto powershell cmdlet) it is stored within the mailbox in multiple image sizes (see chart below) and the lowest resolution is also stored in the AD thumbnail attribute 

You can retrieve each of the above photo sizes through EWS with the following URL:

https://<EWS Server>/ews/exchange.asmx/s/GetUserPhoto?email=<user email address>&size=<chart value>

For example:

https://mail.contoso.lab/ews/exchange.asmx/s/GetUserPhoto?email=scottg@contoso.lab&size=HR96x96

will retrieve the 96x96 pixel image for <‘scottg@contoso.lab’>