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

[HaroldvandeKamp]

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 BarOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-2-Microsoft TeamsOffice 365 profile picture not displayed on all services-3-Office Delve

[#2]

I have just tested the People WebPart on one of my modern SPO Sites and no problems seeing profile picture

[#3]

Thank you for the reaction and testing the situation @jcgonzalezmartin.

I've just checked out the two Office 365 tenant where we are having this issue, but after one full night, the pictures still do not show up in the SharePoint people web part.

How about other Office 365 / SharePoint users?

[#4]

Using the page at https://portal.office.com/userphoto (see the picture below) I've tried to change the profile picture:

• On the Cloud only Office 365 tenant: The profile picture is changed immediately on all Office 365 services including the SharePoint People Picture Web Part
• On the AD Connect synchronized + federated Office 365 tenant: The profile picture is changed immediately on all Office 365 services except the SharePoint People Picture Web Part. The picture is still not visible in this tenant inside the SharePoint People Picture Web Part on modern SharePoint Site Pages

[#5]

Hi Harold,

This problem also occurs on my demo tenant. After a long research, it’s looks like the people web part use the photo from the User Photos Library on My Site Host site collection.

According to Microsoft: “If the user has an Exchange Online mailbox, and the mailbox contains a profile picture for the user, SharePoint Online will request the picture from Exchange Online. SharePoint Online creates a small, medium, and large thumbnail photo from the picture that was returned from Exchange Online. The photos are saved in a folder in the User Photos Library for the My Site Host site collection. The name of the folder will vary, depending on what the My Site Host root web locale is set to at the time of photo upload or synchronization.” Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3185286/information-about-profile-picture-synchronization-i...

My guess is that the sync between Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online is broken. After uploading the user photo directly in SharePoint admin center --> User Profiles --> Manage User Profiles, it worked.

[#6]

I am experiencing the same behavior that you are. No pictures in the SharePoint people web part.

[#7]

I'd put money on the SharePoint Web Part using a different API to fetch the photo than everywhere else. There are many ways to fetch photo, some are SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online friendly, some are not.

Try accessing this url (replacing with a real email address in your tenant and tenant in host url):

https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/_vti_bin/DelveApi.ashx/people/profileimage?size=S&userId=username@teanntname.onmicrosoft.com

and then try this one (Server and Online friendly)

https://tenantname.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/userphoto.aspx?size=S&accountname=username@teanntname.onmicrosoft.com

Do you get a different result?

UPDATE: In looking at the People Web Part and how it renders. Its actually render a base64 image in the actual HTML code. It is referencing an img file like I had suggested above. The above two urls will prove that your photo is not the same in two repositories. I'm intrigued by where the base64 image is sourced.

[#8 · Accepted solution]

This issue is fixed now for the customer. Using Microsoft Support, they were able to make required changes serverside which caused the issue for some Office 365 users. For some users specific users attributes were not set, for others they were according to Microsoft, although were not able to change these from our side. Microsoft changed things serverside to handle this. After a serverside sync update, the Office 365 profile pictures also started to display for each user inside the SharePoint People web part on Modern Site Pages.

[#9]

Should this have been a global resolution? I still have this problem.

[#10]

We have not been able to resolve this issue.

[#11]

Dear all,

We are faced to the same kind of situation, as explained by someone into that thread, the picture profile are dispatched in 2 part:

• Delve ~ Exchange (modern way)
• SharePoint (old way)

So there is an automatic scheduled process to refresh the Old way based on the change done in the modern

It means when the user upload a new picture using outlook, this process to push the new version of the picture into the specific image lib placed into the person web app (https://[tenant]-my.sharepoint.com/User Photos/ ).

When you discover that kind of difference, the only way to fix it is to call MS Support and create a case for, they will execute a documented command (script) which will refresh the picture (for one specific user or the complete tenant)

In our case, we have more than 100'000 users, and that full refresh needs weeks to complete.

Fab

[#12]

This doesn't seem like a viable solution to create a MS Support issue for this problem. 

[#13]

Is this still an issue for anybody?  We have one user, their picture shows up in SharePoint admin center user profiles, but does not for people web part, not sure why...everyone else is ok....

[#14]

Our pictures still do not display in the people web part. I know that we have sync issues which are affecting our profiles but our tenant admin doesn't have the time to troubleshoot or create a Microsoft ticket.

[#15]

I am also seeing the exact same isseu that you have described above. It is occurring for only some users. Is there any fix identified for it ?

[#16]

I currently have support ticket in for this issue and last I heard is that the ticket will go to back-end MS support group to run tenant wide-script to sync images as explained in this thread, I was hoping for a Powershell script to run...

[#17]

Is the "fix" implemented by Microsoft support a permanent fix or a one-time sync that would need to be repeated frequently to keep the pictures in sync? Or is it one time for the current users, but will need to be repeated for new users?

[#18]

I do not know, my ticket is still being worked on, will let you know when complete

[#19]

Update: I ended up opening a ticket with Microsoft. Ticket is still open

Few things to note

1) If the image is synched to exchange online (EXO), and if it still does not showup in people web part, then microsoft would "Run a sync on the tenant" as per their support engineer which fixed it for one user

2) For a different user I found that the picture was not synced to EXO. In this case, MS support asked me to ask the user to upload the photo again via outlook web access. User uploaded the photo but it still dosen't show up in the People web part and its more than 96 hours. Surprising thing is that the picture was showing up in delve. I asked MS support if its not present in EXO, from where does it display in Delve ?. They are yet to answer the question

[#20]

We ran into this issue last year.

The only fix that we came up with which is a bit clunky, but works every time:

Once the user’s photo has been uploaded to their O365 profile, in any site newsfeed (I use my SharePoint training site for this): type the following into the newsfeed: “#Testing @John Smith” (replace @John Smith with your name as the one wanting to fix the issue), then click Post.

What’s happening: The action of their account hashtagging #testing is the part that resolves the issue: Their O365 profile pic wil sync to SharePoint Online and show in the contact section of your site in a few days’ time from the day of hashtagging.

Note: tagging the user’s name here does not the fix the issue but it’s a great way to be notified by email (if you have your newsfeed alerts turned on) of the users who have done this step for you to check in 2 days time when the photo actually appears!

Not ideal as we would prefer a bulk way of doing this but I hope this helps someone!

For ease I place these steps at the end of the steps I provide them for uploading their O365 profile photo, providing the link to the site with the newsfeed.

Cheers,
Jess Wong