Enabling Profile Picture Editing in SharePoint Online

Introduction

In this blog, we will learn and demonstrate how to enable profile picture editing in Sharepoint Online.

This is useful when updating or uploading a picture in the SharePoint User profile is disabled or greyed out. While trying to update the profile pic in SharePoint online, the admin center says 'only the user can change this photo.'

To apply the fix or enable the option for uploading a picture for any user in SharePoint, we need to perform the below steps.

Login to the SharePoint admin center page
Select user profile from left side global navigation
Click on manage user profile and enter the username where you wanted to change the profile pic, see the below image for more details.

Edit the user properties and scroll down the page. Here you will find the option to make available the upload of a user's profile pic. (Only user can change this photo)
To fix this, Scroll through the profile until you locate the field, Picture Exchange Sync State

change this field to 0 (or delete the value that is there) and then Save the profile.
Now, you return to the profile you should find the ability to upload a new photo for that user.

Summary

Once you are done with the issue, it will be resolved and you will be able to update the profile picture. In case of security reasons you wanted to revert back, you are able to revert the picture exchange sync state back to 1. There will be no impact on the existing user photo.