No matter where I work, I always load a headshot picture into my profile or email. I think it adds a personal touch to technology as people know who is helping them. After a short amount of time, people recognize me in person because of this. This would lead to conversations where someone would know my name but I would have no idea who they were. Eventually, they would say something about me fixing their problem and I would go, “oh – you’re the lady with that printer” or something like that.
In an effort to reduce that social awkwardness*, I needed a way to import user photos into Outlook. The thumbnailPhoto attribute is responsible for the user headshot that appears in Outlook or Skype for Business. It can even be synced to the local machine Windows account photo. With that, I just needed a picture for each staff member that I could match to AD. Most organizations have a staff directory and someone has probably taken the time to match and upload a photo for each employee.
The following script is designed to take pictures from an online staff directory and import them into the matching Active Directory user’s thumbnail attribute. If you use Blackboard as your website host, you might not need to modify anything beyond the last page number (if your directory has multiple pages), the URL, and the searchbase value. You made need to use the Network tab in Chrome’s developer tools to see where any javascript links end up.
If your staff directory is not ran off of Blackboard, you can still use this script. Using your browser developer tools, look at the structure of your directory and the picture. Ideally, the picture would have first and last name values attached to it. You would need to modify the value names in the script below.
This script does use another tool to convert pictures into an AD Friendly format. Download and extract the contents of the ADPhotos folder into C:\Users\Public\Staff\ . Your file/folder structure should look like this (extra files/folders are fine):
If you have any issues implementing this script, leave a comment or email me (include your staff directory website). I will try to point you in the right direction. As always, be sure to had a few pause statements and -whatif parameters to test the script first.