There are obviously a lot of things that needs to be migrated when changing mail platform, one of those things that are a “very nice to have” is user pictures/thumbnails which shows up in Outlook, OWA, Lync and so on…

But this can be quite a challenge. The pictures are stored in the “ThumbnailPhoto”-attribute as a byte array, which needs the picture size to be less than 10 kb to work in lync/outlook (actually, the “Active Directory Users & Computers”-snapin wants it under 8 kb to be shown in the attribute editor so this is what we choose).

The pictures from Notes are “user generated”, they can be gif, jpg, png, bmp or something else, and I’m guessing this would be the case for many large organisations out there.

The solution we used was to add a step in our “Notes to Active Directory”-script to check if a picture is available, if it is, it uses a small “advanced function” I wrote to convert the picture to a byte array, and save a copy of the new file on disk, it’s called ConvertTo-ADThumbnail. It also output’s the changes in size if that’s needed.

It looks like this:

PS H:\> ConvertTo-ADThumbnail -PictureFile .\MyPrettyPicture.jpg

OrgFilename : .\MyPrettyPicture.jpg OrgFileSize : 33,748046875 OrgFileWidth : 400 OrgFileHeight : 300 NewFilename : H:\\MyPrettyPicture-ADThumbnail.jpg NewFileSize : 8,9111328125 NewFileWidth : 336 NewFileHeight : 252 ThumbnailByteArray : {255, 216, 255, 224…}

To actually write the “ThumbnailByteArray” to the user object you do something like this:

# Set the folder paths
$PictureFilePath = '.\Path\MyPrettyPicture.jpg'
$ADThumbnailPictureFolder = '.\TheFolderISave\ADThumbnails'

# Load the byte array
$UserPicture = [byte[]] $(ConvertTo-ADThumbnail -PictureFile $PictureFilePath -OutputDir $ADThumbnailPictureFolder | select -ExpandProperty ThumbnailByteArray)

# Write it to Active Directory
Set-ADUser -Identity 'MySamAccountName' -Replace @{ thumbnailPhoto = $UserPicture }

The cmdlet handles most picture formats, and shrinks them until they are small enough. You can set the file size, output folder path etc. with parameters.

I have tested the code on 1000+ pictures, so far so good 🙂

If you missed the link above, the code is available here.