How to base64 encode an image from the facebook api

Question

I am attempting to convert an image url provided by the facebook api into base64 format with cURL.

the api provides a url as such:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-         


        

Answer 1

You just need to add the CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER set to false as the url from facebook is https and not http., or you could just as well request the url without ssl by replacing https with http.

Try the code below

    $url = 'https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfp1/v/t1.0-9/p180x540/72099_736078480783_68792122_n.jpg?oh=f3698c5eed12c1f2503b147d221f39d1&oe=54C5BA4E&__gda__=1418090980_c7af12de6b0dd8abe752f801c1d61e0d';

try {
    $c = curl_init($url);
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 3);

    /***********************************************/
    // you need the curl ssl_opt_verifypeer
    curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
    /***********************************************/

    $result = curl_exec($c);
    curl_close ($c);

    if(false===$result) {
       echo 'fail';
    } else {
       $base64 = '<img alt="Embedded Image" src="data:image/jpeg;charset=UTF-8;base64,'.base64_encode($result).'"/>';
       echo $base64;
    }
} 
catch ( \ErrorException $e ) {
    echo 'fail';
}

Answer 2

Maybe this won't help much but it seems that the original picture (ending with _o) does not need gda nor oe oh parameters

to get the original profile picture you can do:

var username_or_id = "name.lastname" //Example
get_url ("http://graph.facebook.com/$username_or_id/picture?width=9999")

hth

Answer 3

To address your specific problem, your script is likely failing because the required oh, oe, __gda__ parameters are getting separated during the GET request and therefore are not included in $_GET['url'].

Make sure you're using a URL-encoded string so any unencoded & characters aren't handled as delimiters. Then just decode the string before passing it on to cURL.

...

$url = urldecode($_GET['url']);

...

---

For anyone curious, you can still load any Facebook image from any one of their legacy CDNs without needing the new parameters:

1. https://scontent-a-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/
2. https://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/
3. https://scontent-c-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/

Just append the original image filename to the URL et voila.

Disclaimer: I have no idea how long this little trick will work for so don't use it on anything important in production.

Answer 4

I had similar problem. My solution:

$url = urldecode($url);
return base64_encode(file_get_contents($url));

Where the URL is to Graph API:

https://graph.facebook.com/$user_id/picture?width=160

(You probably want to also check, if file_get_contents returns something)