Get user picture

Question

OS: Win7x64 (2008,2008r2). Lang: Delphi Xe2.

Answer 1

There is an undocumented function in shell32.dll. On Windows XP its ordinal is 233, on Windows Vista and 7 its ordinal is 261.

Its function prototype (from Airesoft) is:

HRESULT WINAPI SHGetUserPicturePath (
    LPCWSTR pwszPicOrUserName, 
    DWORD sguppFlags, 
    LPWSTR pwszPicPath, 
    UINT picPathLen 
)

You can use this function to retrieve the path where the user picture is stored. Just pass the user name as pwszPicOrUserName, the buffer where you want to store the path to the picture as pwszPicPath and the size of the buffer in chars as picPathLen. You can set sguppFlags to 0 or to any of the other flags posssible.

There is also a undocumented function which you can use in order to set the user picture of a user. Its ordinal is 234 on Windows XP, 262 on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Its function prototype (from Airesoft) is:

HRESULT WINAPI SHSetUserPicturePath ( 
    LPWSTR pwszAcctName, 
    DWORD reserved, 
    LPCWSTR pwszPictureFile 
)

Pass the name of the user whose picture should be changed as pwszAcctName and the path to the picture you want to set as pwszPictureFile. Set reserved to 0. You have to initialize COM prior to calling this function.

According to Microsoft you should not rely on undocumented function because they can be removed or changed with any patch which is installed on Windows.

Answer 2

According to MSDN:

In Windows 7 or later, each user profile has an associated image presented as a user tile. These tiles appear to users on the User Accounts Control Panel item and its Manage Accounts subpage.. The image files for the default Guest and default User accounts also appear here if you have Administrator access rights.

....

The user's tile image is stored as C:\Users\<username>\Local\Temp folder as .bmp. Any slash characters () are converted to plus sign characters (+). For example, DOMAIN\user is converted to DOMAIN+user.

I could not find an API to obtain the image and since the official documentation is calling out this implementation detail I think that means that you are safe to rely on it. That is I think this is a supported way to obtain the tile image.