Get Tweets with Pictures using twitter search api

Question

Is it possible to get tweets which contain photos? I am currently using twitter search api and getting all the tweets having entity details by setting include_entities=true

Answer 1

There is no specific way to specify that I need only photos or videos but you can filter the results based on filter:links or filter:images or filter:videos in your query along with include_entities=true.

For Example: To get the tweets that contain links since 2012-01-31, you query should have include_entities parameter as well as filter:links as shown as follows:

https://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from%3Agoogle%20since%3A2012-01-31%20filter%3Alinks&include_entities=true"

As your need is to filter your tweets based on images/photos, I think you should use filter:images.

An example of your case would look like:

https://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=from%3Agoogle%20since%3A2012-01-31%20filter%3Aimages&include_entities=true"

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

With Latest twitter API I couldn't get filters work and I couldn't find either any explanation in their docs. Althought you can get all the tweets and then parse only the media ones. You can fire this if inside your parsing script:

if(this.entities.media != null){
  //Parse the tweet
}

This is not the best solution but the worst part comes to twitter who's giving you more information and using more of its own resources.

Answer 3

For filter in twitter API you can check official document for latest version as on date Apr 02 2019

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/search/guides/standard-operators.html

Answer 4

In the lastest twitter API you can do it in the ConfigurationBuilder instance, before creating the Twitter instance:

ConfigurationBuilder cb = new ConfigurationBuilder();
cb.setDebugEnabled(false);
cb.setOAuthConsumerKey(API_KEY);
cb.setOAuthConsumerSecret(API_SECRET);
cb.setOAuthAccessToken(ACCESS_TOKEN);
cb.setOAuthAccessTokenSecret(SECRET_KEY);
// enabling include_entities parameters
cb.setIncludeEntitiesEnabled(true);
Twitter twitterInstance = new TwitterFactory(cb.build()).getInstance();

Also, after enabling the entities, in the search string you have to had the condition "filter:images".

List<String> keywords = new ArrayList<String>();
keywords.add("#pet");
keywords.add("cat");
// String.join for Java 8
String twitterSearchString = "((" + String.join(" OR ", keywords) + ")";
// adding the filter condition
twitterSearchString  += " AND filter:images)";
Query q = new Query(twitterSearchString);

And you will get just results with images (tested with twitter4j-core 4.0.4).