SOLVED

Office 365 Profile picture not displayed inside SharePoint People Web Part on Modern Site Page

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I'm having an issue regarding Office 365 profile pictures not displaying on the Modern SharePoint People Web Part inside Office 365. We have this issue seen in two separate Office 365 tenants, both located in Europe. One tenant is Cloud only, so it's not connected via Azure AD Connect. The other tenant is using federated accounts and has both Azure AD Connect and ADFS implemented.

 

Behavior summary:

  • Profile picture displayed in Office 365 Suite Bar: Yes
  • Profile picture displayed in Office Delve: Yes
  • Profile picture displayed in Outlook on the Web: Yes
  • Profile picture displayed in Microsoft Teams: Yes
  • Profile picture displayed in SharePoint People Web Part on a Modern SharePoint Page: No, although we would expect the picture also to be displayed there.

  

Detailed behavior

When the profile picture is set in Office 365, it is shown in all Office 365 Apps, except inside the SharePoint People Web Part on a Modern SharePoint Site Page. When I remove the picture using the Change Picture link inside the Office 365 Suite Bar, or remove it via Microsoft Teams and later change it to a different picture, we run into the same scenario: The picture is shown everywhere in Office 365, except inside the SharePoint People Web Part located on a Modern SharePoint Site Page.

 

See the attached pictures displaying the issue. 

More people of you seen this issue? Do you know a workaround or do you know how to fix this?

 

Office 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-1-SharePoint and Office 365 Suite Bar after changeOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-1-SharePoint and Office 365 Suite Bar after changeOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-1-SharePoint and Office 365 Suite BarOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-1-SharePoint and Office 365 Suite BarOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-2-Microsoft TeamsOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-2-Microsoft TeamsOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-3-Office DelveOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-3-Office Delve

65 Replies

We did manage to get this issue resolved with the help of Microsoft support.  I tried to get a good explanation of what they did behind the scenes so that I could save you all the week and a half of back and forth troubleshooting, but their response (quoted below) was somewhat vague.  My best suggestion is to create a support ticket and push front end support to engage the backend team immediately.  Good luck!

 

Issue Definition: SharePoint Online not showing images in people Web part

 

Resolution:

 

As there was an issue from the backend server for the SharePoint site we had to involve the component team to get the glitch removed after you are now able to see people's photos in SharePoint Web app.

 

There were some backend scripts that were run from the backend using a tool to which even we do not have access we have to send a request to the backend team to do the needful hence I would not be able to send you the tool we used to fix the issue.

 

If you require any further help, please submit a service request from the Office 365 admin center (https://portal.office.com) or contact us at 1-800-636-7914.

took us a few weeks, but our issues were resolved as well, same resolution to Daniel, had to go to a backend queue for them to run script to resolve.

Thanks for everyone's detailed explanation and suggested actions. We were having precisely the same problem, and it's helpful to know that I haven't gone crazy. Perhaps if enough people reply to this thread, it will spur Microsoft to address the issue globally. #iexperiencedthistoo

I've the same problem.  I have created a service request and have daily contact with Microsoft Support about this issue.

 

UPDATE: I think I've found the solution. A profile picture only shows up in SharePoint if the users visites Delve for the first time.

This doesn't just affect the modern web part - it's the same issue in classic SP. When you try to render the profile picture, some work, some don't - even though the exact same code is used. Total BS that Msft hasn't got this fixed. Why are they so bad at such basic things?

More context to illustrate just how ridiculous this bug is: 

Profile pic from people field shows up in default list view 

Same person, same list - the pic doesn't show when the list view is rendered using csr (via jslink)

If I inspect the code output it's EXACTLY the same in both instances, yet in one it works and the other it doesn't.

Hi Everyone - For the user who's photo is missing in the People Web Part, has that user attempted to browse to SharePoint or OneDrive? If they select the SharePoint or OneDrive tile from the Office 365 portal: https://www.office.com/?auth=2&home=1 this should kick off the photo sync. There will be a wait period of up to 24 hours (or something), but worth a shot. Also, if you start the process of opening a support request by typing 'sharePoint Online not showing images in people Web part' or similar you should see this same proposed workaround as an article and/or a diagnostic asking for the user email for the user who's image is missing. 

 

Let me know if either of these help. 

 

Thanks, 

Bryan

Hi Bryan - thanks for the suggestion. I believe this was recommended earlier in the thread somewhere and for us did successfully force an individual's photo to appear on our site. As an overall resolution, though, this wouldn't suffice for our organization when we wanted to have our SharePoint site fully populated with user images PRIOR to setting the site live. Engaging Microsoft support was the only way I was able to accomplish this.
I second Daniel, We don't want to send emails out to CIO, VPs, Directors, Owners, (anybody really), to click on the following link so your picture will show up in Modern People Webpart

@Bryan Petersen : we also have this issue for more than 1 year. I have asked a few users to open Delve and the SharePoint tile from 365 but I have my doubts this will work. Uploading a profile picture in the Admin Tenant works, I tested this today but this is not something I can do for a lot of users. In any case I know now that a Microsoft Ticket will do the trick in case this does not work. Many thanks for everybody's feedback. It helped me a lot!

@Daniel Carp Thanks much for your reply. I understand the dilemma. Bryan

@Bryan Petersen@Carol Iven We opened a ticket with Microsoft, but a month later users' O365 photos are not yet showing up in SharePoint. Is there a specific wording or specific guidance we should provide when making the request to Microsoft?

Update: Conversations with Microsoft Support have not yielded any magic "back-end" solution that could be applied to our account to sync photos. We ultimately did the following:

 

1. For users with photos in O365 that weren't syncing: update manually in SharePoint Admin under "User Profiles > Manage User Profiles > Edit my profile > Picture Exchange Sync State: Change from 1 to 0 > Upload a new photo

 

2. For users with no photo in O365: Instruct them to upload photos at https://portal.office.com/account/#personalinfo. This link brings the user to the settings under "My account" and not "My profile" (which points to Delve and doesn't sync to SharePoint)

 

Still not a workable option for 1000 users.

@Tom AtkinsonI just got off the phone with MS support and was lucky enough to get someone very knowledgeable about the photo sync process in SharePoint. First let me say that he told me to not change the "Picture Exchange Sync State" property on users profiles. It could cause internal issues with the sync process and cause you to have to contact support to get those resolved. Here I hope is the magic solution to everyone's issues in this thread. I have not tested this yet so I can't confirm it works but here is what he said:

 

I know you have reviewed some information on the photo synch process and you may have seen this article already but I wanted to make sure you have it handy as much of the information we discussed is contained in this article.

 

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/information-about-profile-picture-synchronization-in-office...

 

As mentioned, for photo sync to work with SharePoint Online there are some key factors that have occur.  SharePoint Online requires the user to have a mailbox in the Office 365 and the user photo must exist at the root of the mailbox in order for sync to occur. You can edit the following link with the email of any user to confirm that a photo is present in Exchange Online. Access the link with an authenticated account:

 

https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx/s/GetUserPhoto?email=user@domain.com&size=HR648x648

 

The first time a user navigates within SharePoint Online, there is a discovery process that will occur to determine if the user has a mailbox. This process will update required information within the users profile to ensure the link to the mailbox. The user will require a second navigation within SharePoint to initiate the actual sync. Discovery is a onetime process. Not all sites will trigger the discovery and sync. Primary locations are the SharePoint Home page, the root site collection and OneDrive sites.

 

When a user navigates to a page in SharePoint Online that contains the code that makes call backs for sync, the first step in the process will be to validate the time stamp of the photo stored in SharePoint. If the photos is less than 24 hrs. old we will not attempt the sync. SharePoint will load the photo is has and move on. This means that the a user cannot update the photo multiple times in a 24 hour and expect the picture to update. If the photo is older the 24 hours, a call will be made to Exchange online to compare the binary data of the photo. If the there is a change, SharePoint will pull the data and create 3 copies of the photo (S,M,L) for use in various locations inside of SharePoint.

 

It is possible to programmatically update photos in SharePoint Online using supported API’s to build solutions. One example solution can be on the GitHub site. This solution is not supported by Microsoft but is built on supported API’s.

 

https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP/tree/f735139f22ab9f415ca0c876961710630f44267c/Samples/Core.Profile...

 

The big piece of information I got from this was the 24 hour delay in the photo sync. If you upload a new photo and your existing photo is less than 24 hours old, you have to wait 24 hours and then visit the SharePoint home page to trigger the photo sync process.

 

I hope this helps everyone.

@Mike_Adler So glad you got this sorted out for your company. We ended up reverting to a manual effort in the end, but hopefully this will benefit those with larger tenants.

Experiencing this issue as well. Have created a ticket with Microsoft support and will ask them to sync all pictures, which will take some time. Not sure why this issue still exists, it was reported quite some time ago.