/_layouts/15/userphoto.aspx to get user photo

[PooLP]

What type of issue is this?

Question

What SharePoint development model, framework, SDK or API is this about?

not applicable

Target SharePoint environment

SharePoint Online

What browser(s) / client(s) have you tested

• 💥 Internet Explorer
• 💥 Microsoft Edge
• 💥 Google Chrome
• 💥 FireFox
• 💥 Safari
• mobile (iOS/iPadOS)
• mobile (Android)
• not applicable
• other (enter in the "Additional environment details" area below)

Additional environment details

No response

Issue description

Hi,
I'm use this url to retrieve users avatar (replace "accountName" by email) in SPFx dev :
/_layouts/15/userphoto.aspx?size=M&accountname=accountname

I never had a problem, but since this morning, it does not work on of my all tenants. Are you also having the problem?

This method is also used by @hugoabernier in are livePersonaCard ;)

Thank you for reporting this issue. We will be triaging your incoming issue as soon as possible.

[bcameron1231]

I've noticed some weird behaviors recently where SharePoint Photo Sync (or some system process as noted by system account modification has been replacing user's photos with empty placeholders.

If you go to the user photos library in personal sites (tenant-my)... are your user photos blank like mine?

This is definitely a regression that I saw, which started about a week and a half ago.

[PooLP]

The users photos in 0365bar appear blank in personal sites, but i don't find a user photo library on my tenant.

The users photos reappearing this morning (not all).

I have a little suggestion :

If the user's photo does not exist, there should not be the returned replacement photos (the silhouette), because if we use the Persona Fluent UI, it is this replacement photo that appears instead of the initials.

[PooLP]

after a few hours, the users photos has disappeared again. it's really strange :(

[bcameron1231]

So, for clarity. The photo in the top right, is not fetched the same way as userphoto.aspx is. That photo is coming from Graph/Outlook/Exchange.

The user photo library is on your mysites site. https://yourtenant-my.sharepoint.com/User%20Photos/

Photos from Exchange, get synchronized to SharePoint and stored here. The Userphoto.aspx url pulls from this location.

What is happening to me, is that I upload pictures, they get stored here... and then a System Account is overwriting these with empty placeholders. Thus, /_layouts/15/userphoto.aspx returns blank.

[PooLP]

ok, thanks.

In user photo library on mySite site, some photos appear, but certain size is not present (M size) and it's random.
I will watch this library over the next few days.

[mbice]

We have been seeing the same issue start to show up on various customer tenants (not all of them and it seems to randomly break and fix itself). I haven't seen actual photos get overwritten in the User Photos library, but what we are specifically seeing is that photos requested through the userphoto.aspx endpoint are breaking, but still working when pulling them via the user profile API. So direct links to the photos still seem ok.

[bcameron1231]

@mbice I saw similar as well, when I was using the DelveApi.ashx to pull photos, about 3.5 weeks ago... Photos existed, but it returned no photos. Must be some type of caching issue for you on the Microsoft side.

I then switched back to the UserPhoto.aspx endpoint, and it worked briefly, but then the photos were being overwritten constantly.

Looks like a couple things at play...

[PooLP]

After one week, i have always problems. It's aleatory.

[PooLP]

After one month+, the problem still exists. It's aleatory.

[bcameron1231]

@PooLP Yup. Unfortunately, User Photos have always been an issue in SPO. I would submit a support request and see if you can get any help there. I ended up building my own user profile synchronization tool and use photos stored on Azure CDN instead because SharePoint just wasn't reliable enough. 👍

[PooLP]

In the meantime, i'm use graph to get the user photo.