A quick Google-whack will provide you with an appropriate tool for the purpose, such as Code Two Active Directory Photos or AD Bulk Image Editor to name a few, all of which offer friendly GUI’s. Fortunately the ‘See a Need, Fill a Need’ philosophy has come into play, and there are more third party AD Photo Import tools than you can shake a stick at. The process is far from streamlined when it comes to importing many photos at once. The Microsoft method of importing photos into AD is to use the Exchange cmdlet ‘Import-RecipientDataProperty’ with the appropriate switches. The below images show a before import and after import state of the attribute – Note that you are not able to see the actual image from within AD. Select the attribute editor tab and scroll all the way down to ‘thumbnailphoto’. You will need to turn on ‘Advanced Features’ from the view menu, and then look at the properties of the user account. To view the attribute that we will be modifying, open up Active Directory Users & Computers and locate the user account that you wish to modify. OK, now we’re familiar with our options, lets look at each of them in more detail.Īny photo that you import into the ‘thumbnailphoto’ attribute of a user object in active directory will appear directly in Lync as that users contact photo. If you’re not using Exchange 2013 then your options are restricted to the AD and web server photo hosting solutions. It’s important to note that this feature is not available in previous Exchange versions due to the lack of any Open Authentication standards on those editions. What’s more, these images do away with the aforementioned size constraints of AD and allow us to leverage Hi-Res photos with a resolution of 648×648. We now have a third option available to us with Lync 2013 – the ability to host our images in the mailboxes of an Exchange 2013 server. The second option of referencing a photo via a web server URL is still available in Lync 2013, but the ability to configure and manage this setting no longer exists in the new Lync client. Naturally this looks fine in the Lync client contact list, but results in a blurred photo experience when Lync attempts to upscale the image for use in a conference for example. The Active directory option is available to us again in Lync 2013, but as before it is only able to host images no greater than 96×96 pixels in resolution, and also has a 100KB size limit for said image. Historically, contact photos have been stored in one of two places within the Active Directory ‘thumbnailphoto’ attribute for a given user object, or via a web server URL.

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