I'll go more in to depth about that in the next section, but the important point is that this solution only worked if users ALREADY HAD PICTURES in the local on prem MY SITE HOST, i.e., (the above is for a 2013 farm with domain aliasing a you would use the 16 directory for SP2016) Or a site relative version, like so: /15/userphoto.aspx?size=M&accountname=. Parts (which usually defaults to the pictureUrl mapped property or via userProfileProperties.get_pictureUrl()) to directly reference Sharepoints built in 'proxy page' for photos in the _layouts directory called 'userphoto.aspx that you call with parameters based on the account, i.e., This means concatenating a string for the picUrl variable like so: What didn't work: As many helpful resources that are out there describing this issue, most of them recommend customizing the picUrl variable in display templates in search and the content query web And in some cases the hover panel also showed an actual user image (though not the one that was stored in the tenant!). The really confusing part of the problem was that when you looked at the picture properties and grabbed its URL, you could open it just find on another browser tab on its own. Mo st old school Sharepoint admins know and dread the error box. Problem one: The dreaded gray 'x' where the User Photo should be The issue : User Photo not synchronized between the various components above and in on premise sharepoint, showing different images or an error for the User Photo The scenario: A hybrid on-prem environment of Sharepoint 2013 (one farm in hybrid mode, one not in hybrid mode yet, but using the 2016 Cloud Hybrid SSA as its default search application and its local User Profile Synchronization Service/My Site Host to export the User Photo to local AD), Sharepoint 2016 in hybrid mode ( hosting our Cloud Search Service Application) and Skype for Business, utilizing Azure AD Sync to our Office 365 tenant.

I thought I would share my solution to the ongoing headache of User photo synchronization as it took me forever to come across the correct information and put it all together.

Online skype users with photo