Applies To: SharePoint 2013

The SharePoint Site Feed can be an easy tool for quick discussion and sharing (especially if you don’t have Yammer) and is included in several site templates by default. I ran into an issue that surprised me when attempting to post a reply. I had no trouble posting links and messages, but trying to add an image (clicking the camera icon) gave me an Access Denied error. Huh?

Turns out this isn’t an issue with the user’s account but rather with the App Pool Identity account. Taking a look at the documentation for Site Feeds and you’ll see this sentence:

“In SharePoint Server 2013, we recommend that the same service account be used for both the My Site host web application and the web application hosting the team sites.”

Well, crap. Turns out that I used different app pool accounts for the My Site web application vs my standard web application. So do we need to switch one or the other? Nope! Thankfully, I came across this helpful bit of powershell that will fix this issue for you:

$wa = Get-SPWebApplication "http://my.wirebear.local"
$wa.GrantAccessToProcessIdentity("wirebear\SP_Pool")

You’ll need to run this from the SharePoint Management Shell or use the Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell command.

The first line gets the web application where your My Sites are hosted using the Get-SPWebApplication command. Obviously, you’ll need to specify your My Site host web application’s URL or name (instead of mine).

The second line is where the magic happens. The GrantAccessToProcessIdentity method grants permission to the specified App Pool account (use the service account running your problem web application’s app pool).

That’s it. No need to reset IIS or anything else. Just refresh the page with Site Feed on it and now you can upload photos. Here’s one to get you started: