Get Facebook real profile image URL

Question

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 T

Answer 1

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 ;)

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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!

Answer 4

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/

Answer 5

@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!