Question

Is that real to pull only one (first or last, no matter) photo from each album in the Facebook JavaScript SDK?

I’m tried to make this with a cycle for each album, but I think it is not good idea to do requests to Facebook for every album, especially if user has 50 or more albums. I need it to display the thumbnail next to each album.

What I tried:

FB.api('/me/albums?access_token='+response.authResponse.accessToken,function(response){
    if(response.error){
        alert(response.error);
    }
    else {
        var albums = new Array();
        albums = response.data;
        var albumsCount = albums.length;
        var albumsString = "";
        var i = 0;
        for(i = 0; i<albumsCount;i++){

            //Here is that bad idea with requests in every cycle
            FB.api('/'+albums[i].id+'/photos?access_token='+FB.getAuthResponse().accessToken,function(response){
                if(response.error) {
                    alert(response.error);
                }
                else {
                    var photo=response.data;
                    var photoHere="<img src='"+photo[i].picture+"'>";
                }
            });
            //End of bad idea

            albumsString+="<a href='#' return false'>"+albums[i].name+"</a><br/>";
        }
        var toHTML="List of your albums: "+albumString+"<br/>";
        document.getElementById("resultAlbums").innerHTML=toHTML;
    }
});

Answer 1

It seems like you’re looking for the cover photo of each album. One trick I found was to use the /picture connection from an album id.

So, https://graph.facebook.com/%5Balbum_id%5D/picture will redirect to the cover image for that album.

That’ll remove the need for the inner, slow loop.

You’ll need to authenticate by adding ?access_token=.. to the url to show covers of non-public albums.