Pull twitter profile image

user_149367 0
Viewed 31667

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.

twitter api html php javascript
8 Answers
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

user_2493130

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

user_548140

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?

user_2840710

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.

user_1942900
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