If you use Microsoft mobile apps such as Microsoft Office, Outlook, or Teams with a so-called Android work profile provided by your work or school administrator, you may be unable to see all of your images and other media files when trying to access these from within your Android mobile apps. This is because your administrator may have restricted access to such files for security or other reasons.
This means that even if your personal photo gallery on your Android device contains a large number of images and other media files, you may be seeing very few of those files (if any) when trying to access your gallery from within mobile apps that are running in your Android work profile.
Affected media files include images and other media that you've already saved to your photo gallery, as well as images and media captured and shared using the native Camera app in your device, as well as scanner apps like Microsoft Lens and other media editing apps.
For possible workarounds to this issue, follow the steps below.
Find and share images in Microsoft Teams for Android
If you’re an Android work profile user through your work or school, and you have a number of images or other media files stored in the photo gallery on your personal profile, you can follow the steps below as a possible workaround.
Note: In this example, we’re using Microsoft Teams as the app in which to find personal image files, but you can take similar steps in other Microsoft apps to work around the issue.
Do the following:
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In the Microsoft Teams app on your Android device, tap Chat, and then select a contact for whom to compose a new message.
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Try to add an image to your message by tapping the Camera icon.
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Look for the notification that says, Displaying media from work profile. Tap here to access all media.
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Tap the notification message, and then proceed to access your media files and folders as you normally would.
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When you've selected the file or files you want to add to your message, tap Done.
Alternately, you can try one of the following:
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Follow the same steps as above by tapping on the notification message while you’re in the image or media capture screen (for example, your Camera app or the Microsoft Lens app).
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If you choose Open photo library from the media picker, you’ll see the full screen gallery. If you don’t see all of the images here that you’re looking for, you can try to access the images from your personal profile by tapping the folder icon near the top of the screen.
Note: If your organization’s IT administrator has fully restricted access to personal media from any app running within a work profile on your Android device, then the workarounds documented in this article won’t work for you. In this case you will not be able to access any personal images from any Microsoft mobile apps or any enterprise apps to which your organization's policy applies. For more information, please contact your organization's IT administrator.
How to tell if your apps are running in a work profile
To tell the difference between a normal app on your Android device and an app that's part of your work profile, look for a small briefcase icon in the lower right corner of the app’s original icon.
Apps with the small briefcase icon in the lower right corner are Android work profile apps. The ones without it are Android apps that you can run normally within your personal user profile.
