Awhile back, I built a little widget for a client that pulled the “photo” status updates from his feed. Until today, all of the “photo” type posts contained a “picture” property which contained the URL for the small image. As of today this property doesn’t seem to be present in the feed. I’m aware that I can hit the graph api again with the objectID and get all of the images for that post, but I’d prefer not to hit the API multiple times.
Did Facebook inadvertently break something here or was this an unannounced change?
I’d still love to hear other solutions if anyone else runs into this problem, but I ended up having to workaround this issue. My solution was to create a server side script that’ll grab the original wall feed, then hit the API again for each photo post so I could reconstruct (and cache) an object with the data I need.
Followup – it looks like there was a bug, it just took a week to show up on the developer site. It doesn’t sound like it’s 100% fixed yet either.
https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/310612805658295