How to get and update your profile picture in Active Directory (AD)

Xavier Geerinck -

Updating your Profile Picture in Active Directory is often an annoying process with not enough tools available (or working) to do so. Luckily there are some handy powershell commands that we can use to update this quickly.

Requirements

First we need to enable the command that we want to use:

  1. Download Remote Server Administration Tools for your OS version (in my case Windows 10 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45520)
  2. Open an elevated PowerShell (ignore the warning) and run: import-module ActiveDirectory

Interesting commands

Get Full User Details

Get-ADUser -Credential "<your_username>" -Server "<your_server>" -f {GivenName -eq 'Xavier' -and Surname -eq 'Geerinck'} -Properties * | Select *
Note: Instead of specifying the GivenName and Surname through the filter (-f) you can also just add your <your_username> to achieve the same effect

Save User Photo

Get-ADUser -Credential "<your_username>" -Server "<your_server>" -f {GivenName -eq 'Xavier' -and Surname -eq 'Geerinck'} -Properties *

$userProperties.thumbnailPhoto | Set-Content "C:\ProfilePicture.jpg" -Encoding byte

Update User Photo

Get-ADUser -Credential "<your_username>" -Server "<your_server>" <your_username> -Replace @{thumbnailPhoto=([byte[]](Get-Content "C:\ProfilePicture.jpg" -Encoding byte))}