Profile picture not displaying in Outlook inbox

Question

Hello,

I manage several Office 365 admin accounts.

All users on all of them have a profile picture set up. However, it does not display for the recipients.

Is there some sort of setting that needs to be enabled to allow the showing of profile pictures outside of the organization or so?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Dear Tiago Dumont**,**

Thank you for your response.

As you were testing, sending e-mails back and forth between two Office 365 accounts on two different domains.

Please let me know the outcome. If the issue persists after completing the above, feel free to reach out, and we can further investigate the problem together.

Appreciate your patience with us.

Looking forward to your response and have a great day ahead!!

Sincerely

S M Nazmun Nur | Microsoft Community Moderator

Answer 2

To clarify, the organizations I manage are completely independant. I just happen to provide IT support to all of them.

The profile pictures show up correctly on OWA.

I can't see profile pictures on either the desktop app or OWA for recipients that I know also have profile pictures set up.

There are no Exchange Online policies set up.

I'm testing sending e-mails back and forth between two Office 365 accounts on two different domains.

Answer 3

Dear Tiago Dumont**,**

Good day! Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft community.

I understand you're managing several Office 365 admin accounts, and although all users have profile pictures set up, these are not displaying for recipients, particularly outside your organization.

As per my knowledge, from Exchange Online settings side, there are no restriction displaying information like profile pictures to external domains for privacy or security reasons.

The behavior you're describing is common when recipients are outside of your organization.

Profile pictures in Outlook rely on multiple factors, such as contact synchronization, and the recipient’s email provider.

At first Test with Different Recipients:

1. Have users send emails to recipients using other Office 365 domains or Gmail to test if the profile picture is displayed. This can help narrow down if the issue is with specific email providers.
2. Check if profile pictures are visible when using Outlook on the Web (OWA). This will help determine if the issue is isolated to the desktop application or organization-wide.

Here’s an outline of what could be happening:

Internal vs. External Recipients: By default, profile pictures are displayed primarily within your organization when sending emails. External recipients may not see the profile picture unless the recipient’s email service supports it.

For internal users, Outlook caches profile pictures. However, this cache doesn't always apply to external recipients unless they are using services that synchronize with Microsoft 365 (such as another Office 365 account).

Meanwhile, please check and verify if your organization's Exchange Online policies/ rules are set not set up manually with external contacts. This can be configured via the Exchange Admin Center.

• Open a web browser and go to https://admin.exchange.microsoft.com.
• Sign in with your global administrator credentials.
• Navigate to Organization Sharing: In the EAC, go to Organization > Sharing.
• Here, you will see any existing organization-wide sharing rules that define what information can be shared with external organizations or domains.
• Check if there is any known manual rules that you can recognize or not.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

If neither of these steps work, please let me know and we can explore other options.

Thanks for choosing the MS community.

Looking forward to your response and have a great day ahead!!

Sincerely

S M Nazmun Nur | Microsoft Community Moderator