Many organizations want to make working with their employees easier and friendier. One option is to incorporate a photo with the user account. This allows applications such as Active Directory, Exchange, Office 365, and Lync to represent user accounts with users’ photos. That makes sense as we have had this option for years with MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and yes, even Active Directory. But unlike those social networks, associating a photo with an Active Directory user account is not all that simple.
Using PowerShell to manage user account photos
With so much emphasis on using PowerShell for Active Directory management, I at least wanted to share with you an option for using PowerShell to update the photo for user accounts. After scouring the internet for options, this is the shortest option I could come up with:
Set-ADUser dmelber –Replace @{thumbnailPhoto=([byte[]](Get-Content “C:\temp\dmelber.jpg” –Encoding
Since I am not a developer—which is pretty much what you need to be to use PowerShell—I can say without a doubt that I would have never come up with this command to complete the task. If I run the “get-help set-aduser” command to see the listing of options, I certainly don’t see anything that could point me to the command above.
Using ADManager Plus to manage user account photos
Some tools are just easy to use and pleasant to work with. ADManager Plus is just that tool when you want to do complex tasks to manage Active Directory objects. If you want to add, modify, or delete a photo for a user account in Active Directory, it only takes you a few clicks to complete the task in ADManager Plus. Under the AD Mgmt tab’s User Management option, you’ll find an option to “Manage user photos.” Can’t get much simpler than this!
After selecting “Manage user photos,” you will get a listing of all user accounts and their photos, if they exist. You can import photos in bulk—you can see that option in Figure 1—or you can import a photo for each user individually, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 1. Bulk import of user account photos.
Figure 2. Individual user account photo import.
I don’t mean to brag, but having the ability to point-and-click to import photos in bulk is not even ADManager Plus’s most amazing feature! The ability to “crop” the photo you’re importing is something that PowerShell could only dream about doing!
To see this feature first hand, download ADManager Plus today.
