GPO add corporate picture to your AD logon account

The default windows logon picture, while very stock is a bit boring. If you’re in the corporate environment where a more suitable logon picture is preferred, here are your steps to adding a default picture to all user’s profiles.

First, pick a picture and make your edits to make it EXACTLY 128 x 128 pixels (you can use the picture in this post as a guide). Make your edits accordingly and make sure to save it with a .BMP extension.

Create a new GPO, name it ‘Default Win7 logon picture’. Goto
User Configuration -> Preferences -> Windows Settings -> Files and create a new file

Create a new file in User Configuration-><figcaption id=

Set Action to Replace
For Source file, place your newly created .BMP in the GPO unique ID path: (you can find it by going to the details tab of the newly created group policy)

The resulting path in the source file should look like:
\\domain\SYSVOL\domain\Policies\{really-long-unique-gpo-identifier}\User\Preferences\Files\User.BMP

For Destination File, enter:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\user.bmp
(to change the local windows 7 .BMP picture)

It should look like the above, be sure to be wary of the direction of your slashes "\" — It should look like the above, be sure to be wary of the direction of your slashes “\”

Lastly, apply the GPO to the proper User OU and make sure to do a Gpupdate /force.

*Alternatively, you can place your .BMP in a separate share on your network, ideally a DFS model will do as a general share requires full permissions. The size of this particular .BMP was only 100KB, so Active Directory replication will be minimal.