# Locating your account picture in the system.



## Mr. Flibble (Sep 23, 2006)

I am an experienced user of Unix and Linux, and I come to the mac loving the BSD backend of Darwin. I am working my way through the O'Reilly "Mac OS Tiger for Unix Geeks" book.

However, I have "lost" my account picture. I have googled, and searched through this forum and others, and I cant find out how to locate the "Account Picture" image itself.

Let me clarify that. I took a neat picture of my dog with Photo Booth, and I selected it as my account and buddy picture. I believe I deleted the copy that was in my pictures folder, as I cant find it in buddy icons, iphoto library, or photo booth. Yet, in chat, and logging in, that image appears. 

I would really like to keep this image seperately as it turned out really well, but  I can't find the image to archive it. I am, as I mentioned above, no stranger to a Unix shell, but I am a noob when it comes to Aqua.


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## bobw (Sep 24, 2006)

User Pictures are here;

Library/User Pictures


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## Mr. Flibble (Sep 24, 2006)

Ah! I had not looked there, thanks! Unfortunately, the image I created is not in there. The stock images for the login/buddy picures are in that directory, but not the one I took of my dog.

Heh, mac users would be laughing at me, I am doing stuff like using find and grep on the command line (I downloaded fink) to search the entire system for all image files, and trying to find the image that way. The trouble is, I have no idea if it is a jpeg or a tif or what, and I don't know the file name! I only know that it pops up as an opton for a selectable picture in: Preferences --> Accounts --> Picture

My only hint is that in Accounts, when I click on my account picture, I can bring it up in a larger size, and it mentions "Recent Pictures" and my dogs picture appears in there. I tried using find and locate in bash to find a "Recent Pictures" folder on the system, but I did not find one.

Heh, it has been a long time since I felt like a noob on an operating system. This is fun in some ways.


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## macworks (Sep 24, 2006)

HOME > Library > Images > iChat Recent Pictures -- maybe ?


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## eric2006 (Sep 24, 2006)

If it pops up in the account pictures, you could select it, then click the edit button. From there, select all, then copy it to another image file..


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## Mr. Flibble (Sep 24, 2006)

Hmm. Still can't find it. I was able to take a screenshot of the image, but that is a kludge. Being from a Unix background I like to know how things work, so not knowing where this file is stored is driving me nuts.

From accounts and edit:






macworks: not there either (I assume you meant /Users as opposed to /Home?)

eric2006: cant seem to select all, the screenshot works as you can see, but what is bugging me now is WHY can't I figure out where these apps pull this picture from? Heh, I can do all sorts of stuff with Unix, but I can't locate a simple account picture! I guess it is wounding my pride...


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## Satcomer (Sep 24, 2006)

At least on mine the picture is apart of the Address Book. The easiest way to get the picture is find the picture with the address in Address Book. When you find the Address Book Entry just click (an hold) and drag the picture out to your desktop. The bad news is once you use a picture in iChat/Address Book the applications shrink the picture to the small size. The original picture are in  ~/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/Images (Unix path).


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## eric2006 (Sep 30, 2006)

Have you enabled spotlight, and tried searching for "recent"? I had a similar problem, and it turned out that my avatar was saved as Recent1.jp2 in Users/<myusername>/Library/Images/iChat Recent Pictures


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## BatGuano (Oct 19, 2006)

/Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.userImage

If you look in Netinfo, it tells you the location of the user pics.


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## sagegrey (Nov 28, 2009)

if you open your entry in your address book and click n drag the picture to your desktop, it'll copy there, although I suppose that doesn't tell you where it was stored in the first place.


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## kaniela1986 (Aug 10, 2011)

BatGuano said:


> /Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.userImage
> 
> If you look in Netinfo, it tells you the location of the user pics.



@BatGuano, I joined this site just to say thanks to you. It worked  Thanks a ton!


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