There are times when you want to force remove profile photos from Microsoft Teams. Maybe you want all your employees to have the same profile picture. Or you don’t like someone’s profile picture at all. The reasons can be many, but removing a profile photo forcefully isn’t as hard as it might seem as long as you are using Office 365. This post will share methods to force remove profile photos from Teams.
Why would you want to Remove the Profile pictures from Teams?
One simple reason is that you are uncomfortable keeping weird profile pictures with your employees. Or you want to assign them to profile pictures that are easy to recognize – a professional photo maybe and not some weird selfie of themselves.
Alternatively, you might want to assign the same profile photo to every employee or a specific profile photo to a specific team. For instance, you can assign profile photos working under the marketing team, a different profile picture to the developer team, and so on. This way, it would be super easy for you to spot your employees and interact with them.
How to force remove Profile Picture in Microsoft Teams
There are two ways to force remove profile photos associated with a user’s account. These two methods are:
- Windows PowerShell
- CodeTwo User Photos for Office 365
Now let me talk about these two in brief below:
1] Windows PowerShell
The first method requires you to type commands to remove a user’s profile picture. A PowerShell cmdlet lets you delete photos associated with a user’s account. Also, you can associate a new picture with the account.
Once you run the command, you can delete the current user photo associated with a user’s account. It will remove the photo from the user’s Exchange mailbox root. Also, it will remove the photo from their Active Directory account.
To get started, follow the below steps:
- Go to Windows search and type Windows Powershell and launch it.
- Now run the following command:
Remove-UserPhoto -Identity <userprincipalname> -Confirm:$false
- Over here, <userprincipalname> represents the username. So make sure to change the name as per the profile.
- In case if you want to remove multiple user’s profile photos at once, then you have to run the below command:
$Users = Get-AzureADUser -All $True | Where {$_.AssignedLicenses -ne $null}
foreach ($user in $Users) {Remove-UserPhoto -Identity $user.UserPrincipalName -Confirm:$false}
2] CodeTwo User Photos for Office 365
If you want an easier way to manage user photos in Microsoft Team, you can use CodeTwo User Photos for Office 365. It is a free desktop app that allows you to upload multiple user photos to your Microsoft 365 tenant and easily manage them from a single place.
It has many excellent features like auto-match and uploading photos to user accounts in bulk, in-app photo adjustment, easy import/export features, and more.
Plus, the app is super easy to use. To get started, follow the below steps:
- First, download and install CodeTwo User Photos for Office 365 on your computer.
- Once installed, launch the app and sign in using your Office 365 account.
- It will display the list of users, and then you can delete the profile photo individually or replace it for everyone.
- Finally, click on Finish.
If you want to apply photos, click on the import button and select a folder containing user photos. You will need to define the filename pattern according to which your photos will be matched to the user.
Once done, the photos are automatically transferred to SharePoint Online and on-premises, Outlook on the web (and its services such as Calendar, People, and Groups), Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business, OneDrive, Delve, Planner, Microsoft 365 Groups, Newsfeed, Microsoft 365 Video, etc.
You can download it from here.
Conclusion
So that was all for how to force remove profile photos from teams. Once you remove the profile photo, it may still be visible for 24 hours. It will only be replaced once the cloudworkloads get an update. So if you don’t see the profile picture, get deleted immediately. Make sure to wait for about 24 hours.
How to remove profile picture of Teams?
Individual users can remove their profile photo in Teams by clicking on their account icon in Microsoft Teams. Then click on the change picture option and the remove button to delete the profile picture. You can also follow the aforementioned steps to get the job done.
How to block Teams Users from changing their Account Picture?
One can easily block users from updating their profile picture by changing the value for the SetPhotoEnabled setting to False in existing OWA mailbox policies. Alternatively, you can create a new OWA mailbox policy, update it with the setting, and assign it to selected mailboxes.
