Question

I’m developing an application that displays a users/friends photos. For the most part I can pull photos from the album, however for user/album cover photos, all that is given is the object ID for which the following URL provides the image:

https://graph.facebook.com/1015146931380136/picture?access_token=ABCDEFG&type=picture

Which when viewed redirects the user to the image file itself such as:

https://fbcdn-photos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/420455_1015146931380136_78924167_s.jpg

My question is, is there a Pythonic or GraphAPI method to resolve the final image path an avoid sending the Access Token to the end user?

Answer 1

The facebook graph api urls do a 302 redirect to the CDN url actually having the user avatar.
You can easily find it using urllib2

>>> import urllib2
>>> url = "http://graph.facebook.com/4/picture"
>>> req = urllib2.Request(url)
>>> res = urllib2.urlopen(req)
>>> finalUrl = res.geturl()
>>> finalUrl
'http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/157340_4_3955636_q.jpg'

Or call the JSON version of Graph api for picture :

http://graph.facebook.com/4/?fields=picture&type=large

Decode it, and get the url :

{
   "id": "4",
   "picture": {
      "data": {
         "url": "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/157340_4_3955636_q.jpg",
         "is_silhouette": false
      }
   }
}

Tips:

1. Do not use https where http can work, it works in avatar api. http is faster.
2. You do not need access_token to query graph api for pictures,it works without access_token as well.