Get User Account Image

Question

Simply: how do I get the user's account image?

I'm using Cocoa on Mac.

Answer 1

The Address Book method doesn't work if the user deletes the vcard.

I use the CBIdentity method that never breaks, as Dave says:

+ (NSImage *)userImage
{
    CBIdentity *identity = [CBIdentity identityWithName:NSUserName() authority:[CBIdentityAuthority defaultIdentityAuthority]];
    return [identity image];
}

In order to use CBIdentity you need to add the Collaboration Framework to your targets and use the following include directive

#import <Collaboration/Collaboration.h>

Answer 2

If you only want an image for the logged-in user, it's also possible to get it with a one-liner using AddressBook:

NSData *imgData = [[[ABAddressBook sharedAddressBook] me] imageData];

but I believe that this is not guaranteed to be the same as the log-in image.

Answer 3

If you can get a handle to a CSIdentityRef or a CBIdentity* that represents the user in question, then you can invoke the -[CBIdentity image] method to retrieve their account image.

Edit:

Here's a previous answer of mine that shows how to query for all standard user accounts on a system and convert them into CBIdentity objects: Get all Users on OS X

If you don't want to link against Collaboration.framework, then you can use something like CSIdentityImageGetData (or one of the similar variants) to get the image directly. I personally find working with a native Cocoa object to be nicer, but in this case it's not absolutely necessary.