Allow reliable synchronisation of on premise thumbnail photos to the cloud where one way sync and dirsync are used by organisations.
Following unsuccessful premier call and forum investigation into synchronisation of a users thumbnailPhoto attribute from on premise AD via Dirsync to the O365 we have been advised that it does not sync reliably and this is currently by design. The workaround offered is to push users images up with a Set-UserPhoto cmdlet and while this works its not a sustainable support method where organisations have many thousands of users.
We strongly feel that this attribute sync should quite simply work as it does with all the other user attributes. It would allow the users to self service their photos via our internal system and trust that those images would be reliably reflected in the users online presence.
We would appreciate if this could be considered for fix in a future release of dirsync or o365 (whichever component causes this unfortunate behaviour)

4 comments
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James commented
I raised this query back in 2015, and decided to try again last month. They are still saying the same thing, and are now suggestion we pay(?) for premier support, and raise it as a suggestion. The only other thing they have told me, is to post more feedback on this site. This is crazy, and isn't going to make a difference. I don't understand why it is designed with this artificial limitation. What's worse, it allows you to sync once, but then never again!
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James commented
I just got off a call with a support rep who told me exactly the same thing. We are going to deploy a script to generate user profile images for our user profiles on premise (Such as when logging into a server or PC), and are going to use the thumbnailPhoto attribute. Since this is already being synced, and shows up in client apps, I can't see any problem with it being used by all other services!
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Rob J commented
@Ronald.
That is expected, not all applications and some parts of o365 cloud use the userphoto attribute.
thumbnailphoto (as small as it is !) is used by both client and cloud apps.
So not an option if you want the users pic to be reliably displayed across all apps and O365. -
Ronald commented
Instead of using the thumbnailphoto (which are extremely small) I would suggest an update of the set-userphoto cmdlet so that it has more capabilities. I've updated my userphotos yesterday (200+) and it went fine. The only problem I have is it doesn't sync to the sharepoint mysite...