Tutorial  Updated

Adding a custom profile picture to your Wii U account! Works only on unlinked accounts

Important: This will only work for accounts that are not connected to Nintendo Network or Pretendo Network as accounts linked to these services will redownload the Mii Avatar Image every time the Home Menu gets loaded!

Tired of your Mii being the only choice for a profile profile picture on your Wii U? This guide will show you how you can replace it with any 128x128 image of your choice!

Requirements:
- A Wii U running CFW, can be CBHC, Aroma or whatever.
- A FTP server running on the console that allows access to system files
- A FTP client, Filezilla for example.
- GIMP or another program that's capable of creating .TGA image files


Step 1: Creating a copy of your user profile
Power on your Wii U and if necessary start the FTP server. Connect to the console using the FTP client of your choice and navigate to "/storage_mlc/usr/save/system/act/". If you only have a single account on your Wii U, download the entire "80000001" folder to your computer. If you have more than one profile on your Wii U, download the folder that matches the User ID of your profile. If you are unsure of your User ID, download all folders and then examine "AccountId" line in each of the "account.dat" files until you find the name of your Wii U profile.

filezilla user save dir.jpg


An example of the "/storage_mlc/usr/save/system/act/" directory.
Step 2: Creating a new profile picture
Open up GIMP or any other image manipulation program and create a 128x128px image. Draw or import whatever you want into this file. Please make sure that your image has an alpha channel in it. To add one in GIMP, right click on the first layer of the image you're editing and click on "Add Alpha Channel". Click on "File -> Export as" and save the image as "miiimg00.tga". Disable RLE Compression or the Wii U might fail to read the new image, resulting in a dummy image being loaded!

gimp alpha channel.jpg



gimp export rle.jpg


TGA export Dialog from GIMP. Make sure that the "RLE Compression" box is NOT checked!

Step 3: Getting the new profile picture onto the Wii U
Go back to your FTP client and navigate to "/storage_mlc/usr/save/system/act/<your user ID>". Find the "miiimg00.dat" file and delete it. Upload the "miiimg00.tga" file you've ´just made and then rename it to "miiimg00.dat". Close your FTP client, if necessary shutdown the FTP server on the Wii U and reboot the console. If everything went well, your new profile picture should now be shown on the Home Menu and the login prompt if multiple accounts are present on the console. Once again, please keep in mind that this will only work for account that are not linked to NN or PN as these will refresh the profile picture every time the Home Menu gets loaded.

filezilla miiimg00.jpg


An example of an user directory which contains miiimg00.dat. Make sure to rename your miiimg00.tga to miiimg00.dat!

Step 4: Enjoy your new profile picture!
This one should be pretty obvious!

login custom profile pic.jpg
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If you have any comments or ideas for improvement please let me know!
Post automatically merged:

For people that have read this before I made my edits: This will only work for unlinked account as linked accounts will replace the profile picture with one stored on the NN/PN server every time the home menu gets loaded.

@Mods: It would be great if the title of my post could be changed to reflect this. Thank you very much!
 
Last edited by EnterpriseFreak,

RHOPKINS13

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Awesome tutorial! I would have never even thought to do this, assumed the picture was generated from the mii data on the fly. Great to see that somebody figured this out!
 

EnterpriseFreak

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Awesome tutorial! I would have never even thought to do this, assumed the picture was generated from the mii data on the fly. Great to see that somebody figured this out!
That is what I assumed too tbh. This was a lucky find for me more or less. What I'd really like to see is for someone to make a patch that disables / skips the re-downloading of the original user image on NN/PN connected accounts every time the Home Menu is loaded so that online enabled accounts can have custom profile pictures too.

I tried deleting and purposefully corrupting the MiiImageUrl field in the account.dat file of my PN user profile but the console stubbornly fixed that every time when loading the Home Menu.

I ruled out using a simple DNS server to block out the server that delivers the Mii Images as that would certainly cause issues with PNs Miiverse replacement.
 
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EnterpriseFreak

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if you disconnect from the internet entirely does it worked with linked accounts
probably but idk maybe theres a cache or something

If you disconnect from the internet or DNS block the server thats in charge of storing the Mii images (mii-secure.account.nintendo.net for Nintendo Network and pretendo-cdn.b-cdn.net for PN) you can this will work for linked accounts too.
 

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