Location of user account / profile photo

When I first got my MBP, I used the camera option to take a pic for my user account photo/icon. It turned out to be a really good pic of me, so I'm trying to locate the original file on my hard drive. I'm running Sierra 10.12.6.

Here are the google suggestions I've already tried:

~/Library/Caches/

~/Library/User Pictures

~/Library/images/ichat/recent photos

~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Images

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iChat/Pictures/

~/Library/Images/iChat Recent Pictures/

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.ImageKit.RecentPictureService/Data/Library/Images /Recent Pictures/

/Mac HD/Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.tiff

To be clear, this is how I took the photo.

Anyone know where OS X stores this image?

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Late 2016), macOS Sierra (10.12.6)

Posted on Jul 30, 2017 6:42 PM

Posted on Jul 30, 2017 7:55 PM

Thanks. That's good news. I incorrectly assumed the screenshot was of a blank image because you had already deleted the image you want to retrieve.

Assuming the picture in that Users & Groups pane is really the one you want to retrieve, then do it this way using Terminal:

dscl . -read /Users/john JPEGPhoto | tail -1 | xxd -r -p > ~/Desktop/pic.jpg

That will perform a hex dump to deposit a .jpg of your login picture on your Desktop, named pic.jpg

It would be best to copy that line (triple-click to select the entire line), paste it something like TextEdit (for example), substitute your "short user name" for "john", and finally paste the result into Terminal.

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