Office 365 Profile Photos - Remove and disable across all 365 services

Steel Contributor

Hey everyone.

 

Hope everyone is well.

 

I received a request from our Corporate Department to remove all user profile photos in Office 365 and disable the option for staff to upload pictures. We basically want to default to the profile picture that displays a user's initials.

 

I tried using an OwaMailboxPolicy but the results are inconsistent:

 

Name DisplayPhotosEnabled SetPhotoEnabled SetPhotoURL

---- -------------------- --------------- -----------
OwaMailboxPolicy-Navz False False

 

Also I can still change my picture and now to make matter worse I got like 3 different pictures.

One in OWA

One in Outlook

One in Teams

 

Please please can someone assist me.

 

Forgot to add..I am running a hybrid deployment with nearly all my mailboxes in Office 365.

 

 

 

 

3 Replies

@Navishkar Sadheo 

You can try the solution @Muditha Chathuranga suggest below:

When you run Get-OwaMailboxPolicy | Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -SetPhotoEnabled $false without defining an Outlook Web App Policy by using -Identity parameter, it disables the feature for all Outlook Web App Policies in your tenant. Including the default Outlook Web Access Policy.

 

If you want to disable the feature for a specific set of users, then you can create a new Outlook Web App Policy, assign it to those who you wish to disable this feature, and then run the command as below.

 

Get-OwaMailboxPolicy -Identity "OWAPolicy_Name" | Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -SetPhotoEnabled $false

 

Regards

 

As you've already noticed, there's no single solution for this. Photos can be stored in different locations, and you have to clean them all. There's a good summary here: http://ilantz.com/2015/11/17/high-resolution-user-photo-synchronization-to-office-365/

 

The OWA policy only applies to Exchange clients. And for the other endpoints, we have no control.

This service might help with managing photos as it has an approval and review option https://www.hyperfish.com/try