Getting a gmail contact Photo using Curl - php

Question

I have created a class managing the connection to Google Contacts API, authenticate and return the contacts.
I've successfully got the contacts list, But I didn't yet manage to get the contact photo. This is my html code :
<img src="<?= $service->getPhoto($contact['image']) ?>" />
and this is my php:
public function getPhoto($url = false){
if(!$url)
return false;
$url = urlencode($url.'&access_token='.$this->_access_token);
//echo $url.'&access_token='.$this->_access_token;
$curl = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 15);
$image = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
return $image;
}
Note that the $url argument is the url provided by the contacts data returned by the Google API, it's like as the following:
https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/photos/media/{userEmail}/{contactID}
This is an exemple of an URL (according to my project) :
https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/photos/media/example%40gmail.com/ABCDEFGHIJK2345
Sometimes the contactId contains a '/'
The error message from Google is :
401. That's an error.
There was an error in your request. That's all we know.
Did I miss something?
NOTE: I tried with urlencode, urldecode and tried without using them...But I got the same problem. Also, the contacts I'm testing with have gmail photos.

Answer 1

You are encoding your whole url and probably which is causing the mess!?
$url = $url . '&access_token=' . urlencode($this->_access_token);

Answer 2

I've finally solved the problem, and this is what I did:
I changed the '&' to '?' in the $url
$url.'&access_token='.$this->_access_token
changed to :
$url.'?access_token='.$this->_access_token
Since access_token is the first parameter ... and I removed the curl, I just returned the $url as it is and put it in the image src.
Although it's somehow solved, I don't know if it's okey to put the access_token in the src of the image (which can be viewed by any client side user).