How to know Office 365 Profile photo update timestamp? How to Synchronize Office 365 profile photo to Workday?

Question

How to know Office 365 Profile photo update timestamp? How to Synchronize Office 365 profile photo to Workday?

Subha Epari 0

My requirement is to build an integration to sync profile photo form any MS Teams(or Office 365) to Workday, when there is a photo update on MS Teams.

I have option to leverage either Logic Apps or Workday Studio to build the integration.

Could I request help to know the last updated timestamp of the profile photo on MS Teams?

Also, directions on how to achieve this profile photo synchronization is appreciated.

Subha Epari 0 Reputation points

2026-02-25T07:32:49.88+00:00

Hi Kha-N,
Thankful for your detailed responses.
Could you kindly help on my previous queries as well, posted on 23rd February, 2026? That will help me progress on the design.

Thanking You!

3 answers

Your answer

Subha Epari 0 Reputation points

2026-02-25T07:32:49.88+00:00

Hi Kha-N,
Thankful for your detailed responses.
Could you kindly help on my previous queries as well, posted on 23rd February, 2026? That will help me progress on the design.

Thanking You!

Answer 1

Kha-N 8,255 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hi @subhaepari,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A, and thank you very much for reaching out to us.

Please note that this forum provides peer‑to‑peer support only. Support for external applications such as Workday is limited, so I can assist based only on available Microsoft documentation and publicly documented behaviors. That said, I’ll do my best to help you as much as possible.

Based on my research, there is currently no supported way to retrieve the last updated timestamp of a Microsoft 365 / Teams profile photo. While you can use Microsoft Graph to get user profile image metadata, Microsoft Graph photo resource does not expose metadata such as lastModifiedDateTime.

That said, I did find a community thread that discusses a possible workaround using SharePoint to infer the last modified date of a user profile image. You may review it to see whether it’s helpful for your scenario.

As an alternative approach, you could call GET /users/{id}/photo/$value, compute a hash (for example, SHA‑256 or MD5) of the photo binary, and compare it with a previously stored hash. If the hash has changed, you could then trigger synchronization of the updated profile image to Workday.

Regarding profile photo synchronization between Workday and Microsoft 365, unfortunately this is not officially supported by Microsoft, and the documentation available for this scenario is limited. For deeper guidance, you may want to raise this question in a user run forum or community that focuses specifically on Workday integrations.

Thank you for your understanding.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Subha Epari 0 Reputation points

2026-02-17T07:34:06.5933333+00:00

Hi Kha-N,

Thank you for the response and details.

Could you please confirm me if User Profile change notification also covers photo change event?

I mean when a user profile photo is updated, then will the User Profile change notification be sent or not to the webhook? I did not find a confirmed information in the documentation.

Thanks and Regards,
Kha-N 8,255 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-17T07:59:36.76+00:00

Hi @subhaepari,

Thank you for your response.

Please note that our forum is a public platform, and we will modify your question to hide your personal information in the description. Kindly ensure that you hide any personal or organizational information the next time you post an error or other details to protect personal data.

Based on my findings, profile photo changes do not trigger change notifications to the webhook. Notifications are only sent when user object properties are updated, such as displayName, jobTitle, department,...

You may also find this Stack Overflow thread helpful, as another user raised the same question there.

This link will take you to StackOverflow, which is outside Microsoft’s domain. Please note that Microsoft is not responsible for the accuracy, security, or advertising on external sites.

For general overview of change notifications, you can check this Microsoft documentation here.

Warm thanks.
Subha Epari 0 Reputation points

2026-02-18T16:40:14.9533333+00:00

Thank You Kha-N for the information. The post on the Stack Overflow thread is very old. I am wondering if Microsoft has any new developments in this area, like photo update timestamp or photo event change notification. Is there any documentation confirming these limitations?
Kha-N 8,255 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-19T05:55:39.6066667+00:00

Hi @subhaepari,

Thank you very much for your response.

Based on my research, as of now Microsoft hasn’t introduced any new developments for tracking user profile photo changes. This is because the profile photo is implemented as a navigation property that’s stored separately from the core user object. Properties stored outside the main user entity aren’t supported by Microsoft Graph change tracking or delta queries, so photo updates don’t trigger change notifications.

I hope this helps clarify the current behavior.

Warm thanks.
Subha Epari 0 Reputation points

2026-02-23T09:15:14.2966667+00:00

Hi Kha-N,

Thank You for researching and confirming that there is no photo change event notification supported.

Since there is no photo change event notification or photo last updated timestamp, we need to now depend on the photo mediaEtag metadata to determine any change in the photo.

As per the available API we could retrieve ETag for only one user at a time.

GET /users/{id | userPrincipalName}/photo

Our requirement is to sync photos of thousands of users, for which is it advisable to hit the same graph API thousands of times each time for each user to retrieve the ETag?

Is there a way to retrieve all user photo mediaETags in a bulk with single API call?

What could be the risk factors?

Please advise on better solutions or approaches.

Thank You
Jack-Bu 6,675 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-25T11:33:34.1033333+00:00

Hi Subha,

Thank you for your follow-up and for sharing your proposed approach using the mediaEtag. Regarding your additional question, I'll share my insight below:

Starting with whether it's practical to hit the API thousands of times for those ETag checks: Absolutely, it's doable and often how folks handle similar syncs without events. You'd grab the @odata.mediaEtag from the GET /users/{id}/photo metadata and store it somewhere like a database for comparison. To make it efficient, use conditional requests with the If-None-Match header, graph will just respond with a quick 304 if nothing's changed, saving you time and resources.

For bigger orgs with lots of users, break it into batches via scheduled jobs in something like Azure Functions or Logic Apps, maybe 100-500 at a time, and run them periodically like once a day. Go async for parallel calls, but keep it under 50 concurrent to stay smooth. If someone's got no photo (that 404), just note it and skip until needed.

On the bulk side, there's no one-shot API for all ETags since photos are tied to individual users, but JSON batching is recommended, it lets you bundle up to 20 GET requests into a single call to /v1.0/$batch, pulling metadata for multiple folks at once. First, list user IDs with GET /users?$select=id (paginate as you go), then group them into 20s and fire off the batches. It cuts down on calls dramatically, for say 5,000 users, you're looking at around 250 batches total.

As for risks like throttling with all those repeats, yeah, it's something to watch for, but manageable. Graph uses Resource Units for limits, photo metadata reads are light, maybe 1-2 RUs each, with caps like 8,000 per 10 seconds per tenant or 150,000 per 20 seconds per app. Push too hard and you'll hit 429s with a Retry-After hint, but build in exponential backoff and monitor headers like x-ms-resource-unit to stay ahead. Keep things lean with $select=@odata.mediaEtag if you only need that bit, and costs should be minimal unless you're on heavy Azure usage. Test in dev first, and if it's spiking, dial back frequency or target active users via signInActivity.

If this doesn't meet your needs, I recommend submitting a feature request on the Microsoft Feedback Portal for photo-specific notifications. In the meantime, the ETag + batching method should be reliable.
Subha Epari 0 Reputation points

2026-03-03T08:57:24.2133333+00:00

Many Thanks Jack-Bu for the detailed explanation and information.
Sorry for the delay in my response.

What would be the expected turnaround time if we request for 'Profile photo change notification functionality' to Microsoft?

Answer 2

Subha Epari 0

I want more specific information on how to retrieve the profile photo timestamp.
Additionally, I also want to know if User Profile change notification also covers photo change event.

Answer 3

To determine the last updated timestamp of a profile photo in Microsoft Teams or Office 365, you can utilize the Microsoft Graph API. However, the provided context does not explicitly mention how to retrieve the timestamp of the profile photo update. It does provide information on how to manage user profile photos and settings, but the specific timestamp retrieval is not detailed.

For synchronizing the Office 365 profile photo to Workday, you would typically set up an integration using either Logic Apps or Workday Studio. The integration would involve:

Monitoring for Changes: You would need to set up a trigger in Logic Apps to monitor changes to the user profile photo in Microsoft Teams or Office 365. This could be done by polling the Microsoft Graph API for updates to user profile photos.
Retrieving the Photo: Once a change is detected, you would retrieve the updated profile photo using the appropriate Microsoft Graph API endpoint.
Updating Workday: Finally, you would use Workday's API to update the user's profile photo in Workday with the new image retrieved from Microsoft Teams or Office 365.

Since the specific details on how to implement the synchronization are not provided in the context, you may need to refer to the documentation for both Microsoft Graph and Workday for the exact API calls and integration steps.

References:

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How to know Office 365 Profile photo update timestamp? How to Synchronize Office 365 profile photo to Workday?

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