Monday, April 18, 2011

SharePoint 2010 users missing pictures in SharePoint groups

We have found many SharePoint 2010 users do not have their pictures when they are added to local groups. Here is the common symptom with detailed description.

1.    Issue - User missing pictures in SharePoint
Picture  not  displayed when  user is added to a any SharePoint group (Members, Owners, Visitors etc. ) of a  SharePoint 2010 site.

2.    Description
When a user is added to any SharePoint group,  the picture does not show.
However,  Mysite has all 3 sizes of pictures (L,M,S) stored in  /User Photos/Profile Pictures/ . Attached are the organizational view of users. Each user has 3 sizes of pictures. My Organization also shows the correct pictures for those people.

The following screen shot shows properties of working picture where url is picked from mysite medium size picture(http://mysite/User%20Photos/Profile%20Pictures/na_harryc_MThumb.jpg).



The second screen shot shows properties of missing picture where url is pointing to person.gif picture(http://projects/_layouts/images/person.jpg). Please note projects is the webapp alias VIP where the site is located.


 
If you explicitly pasted the medium size mysite picture url of missing picture user in browser(http://mysite/User%20Photos/Profile%20Pictures/domain_userid_MThumb.jpg) , picture is displayed correctly. We could display users' organization with all pictures also. However, the SharePoint group seems not able to associate the users pictures with users.




3.    Procedure to Reproduce
  • Open any SharePoint site in browser
  • Navigate to site actions > site settings> people and groups
  • Add new user to any SharePoint group
  • Picture of a  user is not displayed
4.    Similar issues reported
You could find some people also reported this issue.
We have some other reasons that could cause picture missing issues. Here is the partial list.
  • Users do not have picture in AD
  • Pictures not synced to AD
  • Picture not slitted into three sizes.
    Today (4/19/2011) I just found two jobs that might related to this issue. We may have to take a look of the job status.
    •  User Profile to SharePoint Full Synchronization (Hourly) - Synchronizes user information from the user profile application to SharePoint users and synchronizes site memberships from SharePoint to the user profile application.
    • User Profile to SharePoint Quick Synchronization (5 minutes) - Synchronizes user information from the user profile application to SharePoint users who were recently added to a site.
    One update from Microsoft on May 6, 2011 is that this issue also reported by other customer and it may be fixed by Dec. CU. I may try to apply 2011 April CU and test it again.

    Please let me know if you know how to debug or fix this issue.

    8 comments:

    1. Same issue -- image URL in groups or other places in SharePoint reflects internal server name instead of the mysite url. The picture shows correctly in MySites profile. The thumbnail also shows correctly if you replace the server name with the mysite url.

      Did you ever resolve this?

      ReplyDelete
    2. Not yet. We are in the process to upgrade to SP1 + June CU and hopping this could be resolved.

      ReplyDelete
    3. Harry - did SP1 + the June CU resolve the issue? We are experiencing this right now with a client...

      ReplyDelete
      Replies
      1. hello folks, We applied SP1 and August 2011 CU but still having the same issue!

        Delete
    4. We are having the issue as well. So, wonder what we should do? Any ideas? We have a user who's picture simply will NOT populate from his mysite profile into another Webapp.

      ReplyDelete
    5. We had a similar issue. I did not notice it was happening to group lists - it was simply happening in all list views, but it was viewing in the interactive org chart and people search. It was also happening only to all new starters, older staff images were not affected.

      We logged our issue with Microsoft Premier Support, after a couple of months of investigation, this was the fix:

      Clear configuration cache:
      c) On ALL of the SharePoint servers in the farm, Run > services.msc > stop “SharePoint 2010 Timer” service.
      d) Go to one SharePoint server, navigate to:
      Server 2008 location: “C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\”
      (You can see a lot of XML files in that folder and also one *.ini file named “cache.ini”)
      e) Delete all the XML files in that directory, but keep the “cache.ini”.
      f) Open the cache.ini with Notepad and change the number to “1”. Then, save and close the file.
      g) Repeat step b~d on all SharePoint server in your farm.
      h) Go to one SharePoint server, start “SharePoint 2010 Timer” service. Then, wait for all XML files to start generating again. (should be finished in several minutes.)
      i) Repeat step f on all SharePoint server in your farm.
      j) It’s done after all XML files have been generated again on all SharePoint server.

      Check your profile pictures again, they should appear. I had to re-do these steps when we had another issue with UPSA (especially if it had to be reprovisioned).

      ReplyDelete
    6. Hi Jessica,

      Thank you for sharing your solution.

      I inherited my SharePoint environment so in case someone runs into something similar, if you don't have the above-mentioned location on your server, check: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint

      I only have one server on the farm, and after deleting all the xml files and changing the no. on cache.ini, I started the SharePoint timer service. My XML files were NOT recreated.

      Please help.

      ReplyDelete
    7. This is an old post but the solution to populate the pictures into the mysites and webs is to run the command: Update-SPProfilePhotoStore -CreateThumbnailsForImportedPhotos 1 -MySiteHostLocation http:// (this can take 30 minutes or more to run)

      This command along with the two timer jobs listed above is what updates the pictures throughout the web. You can manually run them from the command line or choose "Run Now" for each one in central admin. After this you should have updated pictures.

      Also the directions for clearing the cache should have mentioned to copy the cache.ini file "just in case". If all else fails you can use the cache.ini file from another server in the farm. If no XML were being populated I would think the timer service wasn't running. In Management Shell type: net start sptimerv4.

      ReplyDelete