A strange request comes your way. The photos of everyone in your organization’s Office 365 tenant need to be provided as .jpg files. They have to be imported into a proprietary app, and named based on an attribute that uniquely identifies to whom each belongs. It’s not clear yet if they just want all the photos as a giant .zip archive, or if their app runs in Azure and needs the photos stored in a storage account. You come across the Get-UserPhoto Powershell cmdlet, which seems to offer a quick solution, but it fails to deliver against those users that still have their mailbox on-premises. How to go about it?

TL;DR The sample code that retrieves photos from Office 365 and stores them both locally on disk, as well as in Azure Blob storage, can be found here.

The main goal of this post is to get users’ pictures from an Office 365 tenant. We’ll subsequently store them in 2 places: on disk and in an Azure storage account as block blobs. We’ll only target ‘live’ users, meaning those that have their account enabled and also have an employeeNumber. Our scenario further detailed:

Continue reading →