Setting up a O365 Dev Tenant – Part 4 – Upload User Photos to SharePoint

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Introduction

In this series of posts, I will explain how you can set up a Development O365 Tenant quickly. Using PowerShell scripts, at the end of this process, you will have:

  • A O365 Development Tenant with 25 “DEVELOPERPACK” Licenses.
  • 25 Users assigned with license
  • A total of 274 Users added to the Tenant
    • Set up for multiple offices
    • Organisational structured
  • All users will be MFA enabled
  • All users will have photos added to their accounts
  • Enabling Office 365 Auditing
  • Setting up the SharePoint Tenant Settings and enabling Public CDN for SPFX

Unfortunately, I have found it impossible to do the following via PowerShell scripts, and these would need to be done manually. I haven’t included this information within these blog post.

  • Create a Tenant App Catalog
  • Set Organisation Details
  • Set Login Branding
  • Set Tenant Branding

In my previous post, I showed you how to import user photos into exchange. As we could only add 25 user pictures due to licensing constraints, this post will show you how to upload all the pictures into SharePoint.

Obtaining the code

I have stored my code on GitHub at the following URL for cloning. https://github.com/pmatthews05/SetupDevTenant.git

Running Set-UserPhotosInSharePoint.ps1

Before running this code, I wish to give a shout out to Christopher Walker, who had a PowerShell function for resizing images in a Gist. Thank you. https://gist.github.com/someshinyobject/617bf00556bc43af87cd

This script uses the AzureADUser.csv file and the UserImages profile pictures. It will:

  • Loop through the CSV
  • Create 3 different sized images for the user
  • Upload the 3 images to Root MySite.

To run the script, you need to install PNP PowerShell. Follow the instruction here how to install if you encounter issues. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/sharepoint/sharepoint-pnp/sharepoint-pnp-cmdlets?view=sharepoint-ps

Basically, if you haven’t done this previously, run PowerShell as Administrator. Then type:

Install-Module SharePointPnPPowerShellOnline -SkipPublisherCheck -AllowClobber

You will need to connect first to your root MySite, before running the script. It allows you to control the signing in, for example if you didn’t make your account MFA, then you don’t need to use the command UseWebLogin and just sign in with your credentials.

Connect-PnPOnline -url:https://[tenant]-my.sharepoint.com -useweblogin

Now you are connected, you can call the Set-UserPhotosInSharePoint.ps1 file.

.\Set-UserPhotosInSharePoint.ps1 -Path:'.\data\AzureADUsers.csv' -TenantDomain:'[tenant].onmicrosoft.com'

Replace [tenant] with your tenant name.

This script is idempotent, so you can run it again at any point if there was an issue.

Once the script is complete, if you go to the following URL you will find pictures imported into the library at the root of the mysites.

https://[tenant]-my.sharepoint.com/User%20Photos

When the code is running, you might have noticed, in the UserImages folder, there is a new subfolder called Resize. This is where all the images are copied and resized to before being uploaded to SharePoint.

Running Set-UserProfilePhotosInSharePoint.ps1

At this point, all you really have done is uploaded pictures to SharePoint, they are not tied to the user at all. The following script will update the SharePoint user profile to point to the correct image.

Firstly, before you can run this script, we need to ensure that SharePoint online has already found your users and added them to the user profile.

  • Navigate to https://[tenant]-admin.sharepoint.com
  • Click the link to the Classic SharePoint admin centre which can be found in the left-hand navigation
  • Click User Profiles from the left-hand navigation
  • Here you should be able to see the number of User Profiles registered.

As you can see from my screen shot above my SharePoint has only registered 3 user profile so far. As we have no control over this, I will need to wait until SharePoint Online has done is syncing. This can take up to 24 hours.

After checking back later I can now see that I have user profiles for all users within Azure AD.

This code sets the UserProfile property PictureURL to [tenant]-my.sharepoint.com/user photos/profile pictures/[firstname_lastname_tenant]onmicrosoft_com_LThumb.jpg and sets the UserProfile property SPS-PicturePlaceholderState
 to 0. By setting the value to 0, it indicate that SharePoint online should show the uploaded picture for the user.

First you need to connect to the admin site.

Connect-PnPOnline -url:https://[tenant]-admin.sharepoint.com -useweblogin

Now you are connected, you can call the Set-UserProfilePhotosInSharePoint.ps1 file.

.\Set-UserProfilePhotosInSharePoint.ps1 -Path:'.\data\AzureADUsers.csv' -TenantDomain:'[tenant].onmicrosoft.com'

Replace [tenant] with your tenant name.

Once the script has completed, and search has picked up your changes, you will find your people showing up in Search / Delve etc.

In this blog post we have imported user photos into SharePoint mysites, and updated the user profiles for these users. In the next post I will be showing you how to turn on 365 Auditing, and assigning only a couple of users to view these audit logs.