thumbnailPhoto attribute sync issues

Question

I'm a professional services consultant and have a number of customers (about 9 actually) all on Office 365 E3 plans. For each customer we've got Azure AD Connect configured to synchronize user data to Office 365. It all works great....EXCEPT for user photos.

We use a program to manage thumbnailPhoto attributes in on-premise AD (http://www.codetwo.com/freeware/active-directory-photos/). We are already aware of the size constraints for managing photo data in this attribute and all of our photos full under the 10K size.

Half the time photos sync, half the time they don't. Half the time they sync only to Exchange Online, and not to SharePoint Online. It seems the back-end architecture for user photos in Office 365 is a mess.

We've opened more service tickets with Office 365 support than I can count on both hands and everytime we speak to an engineer we get told a different story about what the issue is. The last engineer I spoke to had me doing all of this stuff in PowerShell to try to fix this issue which (surprise surprise) did nothing!

I'm posting this here in the forum in the hopes that someone with actual real-life experience with this issue on one of their own tenants can offer some practical guidance on how to fix our sync issue once and for all. The interwebs seems to be lacking any thing useful and any documentation from Microsoft on this subject doesn't seem to exist at all.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply back.

Given the ongoing headache we've had with this issue we've decided to abandon our efforts in synchronizing user profile pictures across all Office 365 workloads.

It seems Microsoft has a lot of work to do to make this process more effective and efficient and if there's ever a time that it actually "just works" we will re-consider. We've already spent too much time on support calls trying to get this issue resolved and we are giving up. We've bigger problems to work on besides this.

I originally posted my question on this forum thinking someone would have a quick "fix" but no such luck. Thanks for reaching out nevertheless.

Cheers!

Answer 2

First, I’d like to clarify that the thumbnailPhoto attribute is synced only one time between Azure AD and Exchange Online. Any later changes to the attribute from the on-premises environment are not synced to the Exchange Online mailbox.

Where is that documented? Why does it seem that Microsoft is continually quoting service level agreements that can't be found anywhere?

I've been able to update photos in Exchange Online only using the Set-UserPhoto command in PowerShell. However this only updates Exchange Online.

As I describe in my post we want the users photo to appear EVERYWHERE in Office 365. SharePoint. Delve. Skype. etc. etc. The Set-UserPhoto works great for Exchange but doesn't do anything to fix the underlying issue where once the photo gets updated in Exchange Online it doesn't do anything to update the photos everywhere else.

That's why I'm describing my frustration with how all of the photos seem to sync (or in this case DON'T sync) throughout all of the Office 365 services.

Answer 3

Hi Jeffoliver1000,

Is there any update?

Thanks,

Franky

Answer 4

Hi Jeffoliver1000,

Here is the article about user photos sync issues:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3062745

Since you are able to update photos in Exchange Online but the photos are not updated in other services, I’d like to confirm the following information:

1. If you open Skype for Business client and click Edit or Remove Picture in the options > My Picture, will you be redirected to OWA and does the photo shows correctly in OWA?
2. If you sign in to portal, will the photo you update show up?
3. If you try to change the photo in Delve, will you be redirected to OWA to update the photo?

Thanks,

Franky

Answer 5

Hi Jeffoliver1000,

First, I’d like to clarify that the thumbnailPhoto attribute is synced only one time between Azure AD and Exchange Online. Any later changes to the attribute from the on-premises environment are not synced to the Exchange Online mailbox.

If you need to update the photos, as a admin, you need to use PowerShell cmdlet as our support engineer said.

Since you have made service request, could you provide the ticket number of the service request so that I can review the case logs and move forward on this case?

To protect your privacy, I have sent you a private message to collect it.

You can access the private message via https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/privatemessages/list.

Thanks,

Franky