Question

A client wants the ability for people to upload photos from within their website and have them post to their Facebook page. I’m personally an admin of the Facebook page in question, so I can post the photo myself without issue. However, I’m trying to determine if there is a way for a non-admin to post a photo to an album within the page.

Originally, there was an offline_access scope which would allow me to get a single access token (logged in as myself) to be used on the third party website, but this is no longer the case. It’s looking more and more like there is no way to write any kind of information to a Facebook page (including wall even wall posts) via the open graph api unless you’re an admin and have a manage_pages enabled token.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You shouldn’t need manage_pages permission. You want publish_stream.

manage_pages just allows you to obtain an access token to “log in as” an admin to a page the user has access to. Publish stream allows you to make comments and post on people’s wall.

With publish_stream, you should be able to post pictures to the pages wall as long as that page’s permissions allow you to do so. You won’t be able to upload them to the pages album though, as that needs to be performed by an admin to the page. Just like your friends can post pictures to your wall, but they can’t add photos to your albums.

Using the graph protocol, you can perform any action that both:

1. The user you’re authenticated as has permission to perform
2. Your application has been granted permission to perform on the user’s behalf.

So it’s important to understand both the permission settings of both the actor (authenticated user) and the victim (the object being changed).