Tag Archives: Active Directory

Save thumbnailPhoto to file with PowerShell (Get-ADThumbnail)

A while back I wrote an advanced function for uploading a picture to Active Directory (ConvertTo-ADThumbnail), but I never wrote a function for downloading the picture and save it on disk, so here it is!

It has two parameters, Identity and Path. Identity is the SamAccountName, DistinguishedName, ObjectGUID or SID of the user(s) which photo you want to save on file, and Path is the folder path were it should be save. It saves the file with the name “SamAccountName.jpg”.

This can be useful if you want to verify which picture is actually uploaded to a certain user.

You could also download the pictures of all the people called ‘John’ in your Active Directory with the oneliner:

Get-ADUser -Filter "GivenName -eq 'John'" | Get-ADThumbnail -Path C:\Temp\

I hope someone might have use for this function which is available through this link.