Get Facebook real profile image URL

11
votes

According to Facebook graph API we can request a user profile picture with this (example):

https://graph.facebook.com/1489686594/picture

We don't need any Token since it's a public information.

But the real image URL of the previous link is: http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs356.snc4/41721_1489686594_527_q.jpg

If you type the first link on your browser, it will redirect you to the second link.

Is there any way to get the full URL (second link) with PHP, by only knowing the first link?

I have a function that gets the image from a URL to store it in the database, but it does work only if it get the full image URL.

Thanks

5
phpimageapifacebookurl
Yes, you can do it w-shadow.com/blog/2008/07/05/how-to-get-redirect-url-in-php – Ben
Oh gorgeous thanks a lot Ben, it works perfectly. I am using that so that when a user connects with Facebook on my website, I can grab their Facebook profile picture to make it their default one. Thanks :) – kire
@kire, doesn't FaceBook developers API gives you an official solution to do this? I've never worked with it before but I think they do. Often taking over other websites resources without agreement could lead to an IP ban. – Ben
@Ben what do you mean by "taking over other websites resources without agreement"? You mean it's bad to use or adapt a function shared by someone to help others? Don't think someone who share a server side function is expecting people to ask his agreement to understand and maybe use his function... – kire
@kire, I don't mean the function I gave you, i mean Facebook's resources. Hot-linking images is ofter seen like a bad practice and/or rude if the source of the image isn't aware of what's happening. Read Facebook TOS and the Facebook Developers TOS in order to assure you can do this without using the API. – Ben

5 Answers

20
votes

kire is right, but a better solution for your use case would be the following:

    // get the headers from the source without downloading anything
    // there will be a location header wich redirects to the actual url
    // you may want to put some error handling here in case the connection cant be established etc...
    // the second parameter gives us an assoziative array and not jut a sequential list so we can right away extract the location header
    $headers = get_headers('https://graph.facebook.com/1489686594/picture',1);
    // just a precaution, check whether the header isset...
    if(isset($headers['Location'])) {
        $url = $headers['Location']; // string
    } else {
        $url = false; // nothing there? .. weird, but okay!
    }
    // $url contains now the url of the profile picture, but be careful it might very well be only temporary! there's a reason why facebok does it this way ;)
    // the code is untested!
7
votes

You can get it with FQL:

select pic_square from user where uid=1489686594

returns:

[
  {
    "pic_square": "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs356.snc4/41721_1489686594_527_q.jpg"
  }
]

Also you can just improve your function that gets picture by url. If you use curl it can automatically follow redirect headers.

2
votes

Please note that the The Surrican's answer (and possibly others) can drastically increase your script's response time (around +500ms for me on my server). This is because the server issues a request to facebook (because of get_headers()) and the execution time (computation excluded) extends from this:

  • browser -> server
  • server -> browser

to this:

  • browser -> server
  • server -> facebook (request: get_headers)
  • facebook -> server (response: get_headers)
  • server -> browser

This adds the mentioned 500ms delay. You probably should consider to cache the real url on your server or to load the profile picture via JavaScript. At least take a look at your response time before and after ;)

2
votes

@The Surrican,
Nice code! Here is a clean cut code function for such process!

function get_raw_facebook_avatar_url($uid)
{
    $array = get_headers('https://graph.facebook.com/'.$uid.'/picture?type=large', 1);
    return (isset($array['Location']) ? $array['Location'] : FALSE);
}

This will return the RAW facebook avatar image URL. Feel free to do whatever you want with it then!

0
votes

You can also add ?redirect=false to the end of your URL and then parse the JSON response directly.

In your example: https://graph.facebook.com/1489686594/picture?redirect=false

More information here https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/user/picture/