Updated user photos don't appear in the address book in Office 365

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Symptoms

You update a contact's photo in the on-premises Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). However, the photo isn’t updated in Exchange Online.

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Cause

This problem occurs if you upload a photo by using Outlook Web App (OWA) or by using the Set-UserPhoto cmdlet. These methods update the photo that's stored in the top level of the user's mailbox. This means that the photo that's stored in the AD DS ThumbnailPhoto attribute isn’t updated.

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Resolution

In Exchange Online, pictures are stored in two locations, as follows:

In the ThumbnailPhoto attribute in AD DS
In the top level of the user's mailbox

If there's a photo in the user's mailbox, it will be displayed in OWA, the Exchange address book, and the Get-UserPhoto cmdlet. The ThumbnailPhoto attribute in AD DS won’t be used.

If you want the Active Directory attribute to be displayed instead of the photo that was uploaded directly to the mailbox, follow these steps:

Remove the photos. To do this, run the following cmdlet:
```
Remove-UserPhoto <userUPN> -ClearMailboxPhotoRecord 
```
Note This step removes all photos from the Exchange Online user object. This includes the one that's stored in the mailbox and in the AD DS attribute, ThumbnailPhoto.

Note The -ClearMailboxPhotoRecord switch is required for an Active Directory photo to be used.
In the on-premises AD DS, clear the ThumbnailPhoto attribute for the user.
Start AD DS replication to Azure.
Upload the photo to the on-premises AD DS ThumbnailPhoto attribute. This should trigger a new dirsync operation to send the photo to the Azure account, which will forwardsync the photo to the Exchange Online object. By starting AD DS replication to Azure, you may speed up this process.

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