Skedda supports automatically syncing user photos (a.k.a. profile pictures) from your integrated provider and displaying them in numerous useful places in the Skedda application.
Quickly jump to a section:
What does the result look like?
Below are some visualizations of how user photos are rendered in Skedda.
On floorplans and maps
On the map mode, booking-holder photos are shown directly on the booked space, so you can see who's booked at a glance! The authenticated user additionally sees a "pulse" animation to draw their attention to their own bookings. In this example, Megan Bowen sees animations to draw attention to her bookings for a desk and a meeting room. The visualization also shows Megan's photo in the navbar (bottom left).
On the users list
System users see friendly user photos accompanying each row on the users list. This screenshot also shows how standard "initials" avatars are used for cases where a photo is not available (these "initials" avatars are also used if the photos feature is not enabled at all).
In dropdown lists
Photos are shown in the booking-form dropdown lists (the "Holder" and "Attendees" selectors) as a visual aid to assist in the selection of the desired user(s).
Enabling user photos
Photos are an opt-in feature as part of a direct integration with your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant. See our dedicated support document here for detailed instructions on how to configure the integration and how to opt-in to user photos.
Useful notes regarding user photos
If you have a number of existing users on your Skedda account when you first enable user photos, it will take a few hours for Skedda's background process to do the initial sync of their photos.
When a new user is provisioned on your Skedda account and you have photos enabled, Skedda will immediately attempt to find their photo from your provider. If it exists, their photo will be available for them to see immediately in Skedda.
For non-admin users to be able to see the photos of other users, ensure that the extended visibility setting is enabled (otherwise they'll only see their own photo).
In the case that your provider is Google Workspace, Skedda does not copy any raw photo image data to its systems. Instead, the relevant Google API that Skedda uses simply provides Skedda with a Google-hosted link to the user's photo. That is, Skedda itself does not store photo data if you're using Google Workspace as your tenant.
In the case that your provider is Microsoft 365, Skedda needs to copy user photos to its systems because the Microsoft Graph API does not give Skedda any Microsoft-hosted "link" to photos in the way that Google does. To ensure that Skedda is able to react to any updates to the user's photo on the provider side, Skedda "refreshes" photos every 14 days. This implies that if a user has no photo set up on the provider side but then uploads one to the provider side after they're provisioned on Skedda, it may take up to 14 days for Skedda to fetch that new photo. Also note that, if a photo is removed from the provider's side or if the photo-sync feature is disabled on the Skedda side, user photos in Skedda storage are always deleted within 28 days (as part of our "data-protection by design" philosophy).
For any given user on Skedda, if no corresponding photo is available from the provider's side, Skedda will fallback to the standard "initials" avatar (i.e. a circle showing the initials of the user's name).
If your organization executed a Data-Protection Agreement (DPA) with Skedda prior to July 2022 and you now wish to opt-in to the user photos, please reach out to Skedda support first to request an updated copy of the DPA for signing. Our latest DPA lists user photos as in-scope personal data that is processed by Skedda.
It is not currently possible to manually upload a profile photo/picture using the Skedda interface. That is, Skedda uses only the photos provided by your Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace tenant.
There's a known edge-case issue with the Google API that Skedda uses to fetch photo information in the Google Workspace case. Specifically, if a user's photo was uploaded on the Google side not by the user themselves, but rather by a Google tenant admin, then the Google API does not correctly return the photo URL. To resolve this, the user should upload their photo themselves via their own Google user-account page.
If you happen to have configured your Skedda venue account to allow anonymous public access to your scheduler, note that user photos are never shown to anonymous users. Photos are only ever shown to authenticated users of a venue account that have a verified email addresses. Practically, Skedda always marks email addresses as verified if the user is provisioned/registered via Single Sign On or another external identity provider (like Facebook or Twitter). Otherwise, the user just needs to click on the link in the standard account-confirmation email that is sent to them when they are registered/provisioned (which they need to do anyway in order to set up their login for subsequent use).