SharePoint profile image sync issue.

The SharePoint farm I manage is configured to sync the pictures from SharePoint user profile to AD. Everything was working like a charm until we decided to upload pictures from an internal social media system in which users have profile images uploaded to SharePoint for users with no images in their profile.  I updated the pictures using a powershell script and ran Update-SPProfilePhotoStore command. I started getting the following errors in the event log and the Profile Synchronization Service manager:

Synchronization service Manager Error – MOSS_DELTAIMPORT_GUID stopped-extension-dll-exception

Event Log:

Event ID : 6801

Source: FIMSynchronizationService

The extensible extension returned an unsupported error.

 The stack trace is:

 "System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.

   at System.Net.WebClient.DownloadDataInternal(Uri address, WebRequest& request)

   at System.Net.WebClient.DownloadData(Uri address)

   at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ManagementAgent.ProfileImportExportExtension.DownloadPictures(ProfileChangeData[] profiles)

   at Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.ManagementAgent.ProfileImportExportExtension.Microsoft.MetadirectoryServices.IMAExtensibleFileImport.GenerateImportFile(String fileName, String connectTo, String user, String password, ConfigParameterCollection configParameters, Boolean fFullImport, TypeDescriptionCollection types, String& customData)

Forefront Identity Manager 4.0.2450.34"

After trying multiple things and Googling, I came to the conclusion that the error was due to few rouge images which SharePoint could not convert. The problem was that I did not know the user with the problematic image. So, I first got a list of all images from “User Photo” library in the My Site host

$site = Get-spsite “http://mysitehost”
$web = $site.RootWeb
$list = $web.Lists["User Photos"]
$Folders = $list.RootFolder.SubFolders
foreach ($Folder in $Folders)
{
     if ($Folder.Name -ne "Forms")     {          foreach ($item in $Folder.Files)           {               $item.Name          }     }
}
$web.Dispose();
$site.Dispose();

And then I listed down all users who had their profile images set using the script below:

$site = Get-SPSite "http://mysitehost " $ServiceContext = Get-SPServiceContext($site); $upm = new-object Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfileManager($servicecontext)$upm.GetEnumerator() | foreach{     $pictureURL = $_["PictureURL"].Value           if (($pictureURL -ne "") -and ($pictureURL -ne $null))           {                     $_["AccountName"].Value           }}

After manipulating the results from both the scripts using excel to find the unique user ids, I found that couple of users had their “PictureURL” property set but did not have the corresponding mthum.jpg, lthumb.jpg and sthumb.jpg files. I came to the conclusion that these were the users who had the offending images, since the system could not create the corresponding images from the source image.  Next, I set the “PictureURL” property for these 2 users to blank and started sync again. Viola, it synced the images without any issue.