Finding your iSight Account Photo

When you first get a MacBook (or I assume any Mac with a built in iSight), you get prompted to snap a photo of yourself to use with your account. If you've never used the iSight camera before you'll probably end up with a pretty bad picture - here's mine:

Of course it's easy enough to change that picture, but what if you want it for some other use? Where the heck is it? If you do a Google search for "Locate iSight Account Photo" and its permutations, you'll find that plenty of people have had this problem.. and the picture is NOT easy to find.

One hint suggests opening up the Preferences dialog and clicking on your picture as though you wanted to change it. Then switch to Finder and navigate to /Library/Caches/ - your photo will be there and your user id will be in its name. So in my case, the picture was in /Library/Caches/com.apple.user501pictureCache.tiff. You can copy it from there, import it into Photo Booth or do whatever you need to do.

Don't know your id number? Just type "id" at a Terminal window:

 $ id
 uid=501(apl) gid=501(apl) groups=501(apl),500(foo),98(_lpadmin),
 66(_uucp),80(admin),101(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1),
 102(com.apple.access_screensharing) 
 

The "uid" is your User ID.

It's unlikely that you'll need to actually visit Preferences to get that picture into Cache - after all, it was there when you logged in. I've yet to see it disappear from cache.