How can I sync the Drupal User Profile image and the CiviCRM contact image?

Question

I'm trying to find a way to automatically update the CiviCRM contact image when a user updates their Drupal profile image. I'm specifically looking for Drupal8.5/Civi4.7 but I'll take anything that can properly update Civi4.7 at this point, regardless of Drupal version. It seems that the Drupal/Civi API functions are almost, but not quite, capable of making this easy, although it may just be a documentation deficiency -- I'm still digging in the code.

I found this discussion on the old Civi forum (circa 2011) which discusses it. https://forum.civicrm.org/index.php%3Ftopic=22405.0.html

There is also some old code in the Civi site which directly updates the database and also doesn't seem to work anymore: https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Adding+pictures+in+civicrm+profile+page

Is there anything as of Civi 4.7.30 which can do this?

If not, can someone point me to some docs/examples that demonstrate how to programmatically add a photo image to a contact in Civi?

Answer 1

I am not sure how to sync drupal profile image with CiviCRM contact image through UI. But you can add module and invoke hook to update the contact image.

Here is the snippet how to add image url to contact

$params = [
  'contact_id' => 2,
  'image_URL' => [
    'name' => '/var/www/html/drupal/sites/default/files/civicrm/custom/Screenshot_from_2018_06_19_15_46_08_1877c5451ed2e68a12816071e0006fef.png',
    'type' => 'image/png',
  ],
];
CRM_Contact_BAO_Contact::processImageParams($params);
civicrm_api3('Contact', 'create', $params);

HTH

Pradeep

Answer 2

I think I've figured this out and it seems to work reliably in D8.5.4/CV4.7.30.

The basic approach is to:

1. Lookup the Civi contact based on the Drupal user id
2. Make a copy of the uploaded account pic (Civi can't share, and requires the file to be in the custom uploads dir)
3. Update the image_URL of the Civi contact using the Civi v3 api

You MUST use the image_URL value expected by the Civi code, which is specific to its function. It looks like this...

http://www.mydrupalsite.com/civicrm/contact/imagefile?photo=FILENAME.jpg

...and the file must be in the CiviCRM custom uploads folder. I see no alternatives to this in the code and the docs are completely silent on it. And, yes, I'm aware that this is a FULLY QUALIFIED URL being stored in the database. Whoever chose this technique was either highly constrained by legacy code or smoking crack. I've tried relative URLs and they don't seem to work.

I've created a Github gist here that demonstrates the approach (use at your own risk):

https://gist.github.com/jptillman/ba3f29fd82cc83f3f1de0d807b50c843

In my site using this code, removing the Drupal image also removes the Civi image from the Contact record, but I'm fairly sure that Civi isn't cleaning up, so this will leave orphaned files behind in the custom uploads folder. Probably wouldn't be too hard to engineer a delete of the file somehow.

NOTE: This code will overwrite any existing picture in the Civi record.