Pull twitter profile image - php

Question

Is there a quick way to pull twitter profile image in PHP or Javascript? I need to get the url of the FULL image (not avatar size). Thanks. Any code sample is good.

Answer 1

Twitter has had a nice simple URL.
https://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/abraham
It has size options like "?size=bigger"
You can read more about it on Little known Twitter and TwitterAPI tips and tricks.
Twitter now has documentation up as GET users/profile_image/:screen_name.
Update: Support for this method has been removed from v1.1 of the API. Recommended practice going forward is GET /users/show and cache profile_image_url locally in your service/app.

Answer 2

function get_big_profile_image($username, $size = '') {
$api_call = 'http://twitter.com/users/show/'.$username.'.json';
$results = json_decode(file_get_contents($api_call));
return str_replace('_normal', $size, $results->profile_image_url);
}
get_big_profile_image('bobsaget', '_bigger') should return a large avatar:
http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/330305510/n229938150541_9850_bigger.jpg
get_big_profile_image('bobsaget') should return an even larger image: http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/330305510/n229938150541_9850.jpg

Answer 3

Apologies if this is something that's now known, but I didn't see it documented anywhere during my searches, including the official Twitter docs.
You can add the ?size=original as a parameter, which will return the original uploaded image for the user.
So:
http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/twitter.json?size=original

Answer 4

Previous answerers have provided the correct answer I wanted to link to original twitter api doc page so you'd know it is actually an official way of doing stuff:
You need to specify ?size=
bigger - 73px by 73px
normal - 48px by 48px
mini - 24px by 24px
http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/twitter.json?size=bigger
http://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/twitter.json?size=normal
http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/users/profile_image/:screen_name

Answer 5

So, it's not in the docs (http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/users/profile_image/:screen_name), but it looks like after retrieving the image by specifying any of the three sizes (bigger, normal, mini), you can just remove the suffix before the file extension to get the original image. Hmm... is this safe to use?
For example, this query: api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/rrbrambley
Results in: a2.twimg.com/profile_images/931772958/deformed_cropped_headonly_normal.jpg
If I change this url by removing "_normal" then I get the original image: a2.twimg.com/profile_images/931772958/deformed_cropped_headonly.jpg
I know there are apps that use the original image. This must be the way?

Answer 6

When you get original image link, you can modify it to get bigger.
http://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/34543543/image_name_normal.jpg
becomes
http://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/34543543/image_name.jpg or image_name_bigger, ...
Source: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/user-profile-images-and-banners

Answer 7

I know this isn't the full code sample as requested (because there are several ways of doing this), but do you already have the URL for the avatar? I noticed that turning ".../eric.png" into ".../eric_bigger.png" resulted in the larger image. When "_bigger" already exists, removing it gave me the URL to the original image.
I tested this with several followers' profile images and, when the profile image was > 150px square, worked.

Answer 8

Twitter profile images urls:
Bigger: https://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/puneetsindhwani/?size=bigger
Original: https://api.twitter.com/1/users/profile_image/puneetsindhwani/?size=original