How to get user image with Twitter API 1.1? How to get user image with Twitter API 1.1? php php

How to get user image with Twitter API 1.1?


The user's profile image

Okay, so you want a user's profile image. You're going to need to take a look at the twitter REST API 1.1 docs. This is a list of all the different requests you can make to their API (don't worry, I'll get to how you actually do this later on).

There are multiple ways to get the user's profile image, but the most notable one is: users/show. According to the docs for this, the users/show method:

Returns a variety of information about the user specified by the required user_id or screen_name parameter. The author's most recent Tweet will be returned inline when possible.

Well, the user profile image must be in there somewhere, correct?

Let's have a look at a typical response to a request for this information, using the users/show url (we'll use my profile as an example).

Example response for users/show from the twitter 1.1 api

I've cut off some from the bottom, because there is a lot of data to go through. Most importantly, you'll see what you require:

profile_image_url key

This is the profile_image_url key that you need to get access to.

So, how do you do all this? It's pretty simple, actually.

Authenticated Requests

As you rightly pointed out, as of June 11th 2013 you can't make unauthenticated requests, or any to the 1.0 API any more, because it has been retired. So OAuth is the way to make requests to the 1.1 API.

I wrote a stack overflow post with an aim to help all you guys make authenticated requests to the 1.1 API with little to no effort.

When you use it, you'll get back the response you see above. Follow the posts instructions, step-by-step, and you can get the library here (you only need to include one file in your project).

Basically, the previous post explains that you need to do the following:

  • Create a twitter developer account
  • Get yourself a set of unique keys from twitter (4 keys in total).
  • Set your application to have read/write access
  • Include TwitterApiExchange.php (the library)
  • Put your keys in a $settings array
  • Choose your URL and request method (Post/Get) from the docs (I put the link above!)
  • Make the request, that's it!

A practical example

I'm going to assume you followed the step-by-step instructions in the above post (containing pretty colour pictures). Here's the code you would use to get what you want.

// Require the library file, obviouslyrequire_once('TwitterAPIExchange.php');// Set up your settings with the keys you get from the dev site$settings = array(    'oauth_access_token' => "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN",    'oauth_access_token_secret' => "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET",    'consumer_key' => "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY",    'consumer_secret' => "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET");// Chooose the url you want from the docs, this is the users/show$url = 'https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json';// The request method, according to the docs, is GET, not POST$requestMethod = 'GET';// Set up your get string, we're using my screen name here$getfield = '?screen_name=j7mbo';// Create the object$twitter = new TwitterAPIExchange($settings);// Make the request and get the response into the $json variable$json =  $twitter->setGetfield($getfield)                 ->buildOauth($url, $requestMethod)                 ->performRequest();// It's json, so decode it into an array$result = json_decode($json);// Access the profile_image_url element in the arrayecho $result->profile_image_url;

That's pretty much it! Very simple. There's also users/lookup which effectively does the same thing, but you can:

Returns fully-hydrated user objects for up to 100 users per request, as specified by comma-separated values passed to the user_id and/or screen_name parameters.

If you ever need to get more than one user's details, use that, but as you only require one user's details, use users/show as above.

I hope that cleared things up a bit!


You say you want to use Twitter API 1.1 and yet you don't want to authenticate your requests.Unauthenticated requests are not supported in API v1.1. So please adjust to the API change. See updates :

You can get image from profile_image_url field of https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json request. Either a id or screen_name is required for this method. For example :

GET    https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json?screen_name=rsarver

See details here https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/users/show