How to sync user profile pictures from one tenant to another

Question

Hello,

My company is syncing/syndicating user profiles from 3 regional M365 tenants, to a single "global" tenant - which we're using for a company-wide SharePoint and Teams (etc.).

Our test case so far has seen us successfully sync in 700+ user accounts from tenant A to tenant B. However, although all the profile data has been synced as part of the process, the user profile pictures haven't. This means on SharePoint, where we have pages using the "People" web part (as one example) they look very bland. Several stakeholders have asked when their profile pictures will be appearing in SharePoint.

I'm assuming the standard way of synchronising/syndicating users between tenants does not include the profile picture?

If so, is there another way of doing it? I was thinking that we could use PowerShell to connect to tenant A - fetch the profile picture of a user, and then write it to the equivalent account in tenant B. Is that a viable approach?

Or, is there something we could do with a Power Automate flow, triggered when a profile is first synced, which would then fetch the user's picture from their "home" tenant, and upload it to their user account on the "global" tenant?

Any info or ideas would be much appreciated.

Alternatively, is there a direct link that someone can use, in SharePoint - to upload their profile picture on the "second" tenant (i.e. the tenant their account has been syndicated to)?

Thank you,

Steve.

Answer 1

Hi Steve,

You can use PowerShell script to update Teams/Outlook user profile pictures via the PS command Set-UserPhoto. However you can check the detailed command and process over here - https://office365itpros.com/2023/10/09/user-photo-cmdlets/#:~:text=According%20to%20message%20center%20notification,%2C%20and%20Remove%2DUserPhoto

Hope this helps. JS

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Answer 2

Hi @Steve Smith,

Thank you for posting in this community.

Based on your question, I did a lot of searching, but unfortunately I wasn't able to find a relevant way to synchronize a user's photos.

I'm not quite sure how you accomplished this cross-tenant synchronization of user profiles. It seems that something went wrong during your synchronization process and the user profile pictures were not synchronized.

This article describes how user profile pictures are synchronized in SharePoint Online, hope this helps.

Information about profile picture synchronization in Microsoft 365

If it still doesn't solve your problem, then I am afraid you will have to manually add the user's profile pictures again.

Thank you for your kind understanding.

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