Facebook – How to get Facebook Profile image from email

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There's an outlook plugin called Xobni that has a really cool feature, if a contact has an email address, it will fetch that contact's profile picture and display it. Their FAQ states the following:

Xobni sends an encrypted email address to Facebook to retrieve the Facebook profile for the person who is currently being viewed in the Xobni sidebar. Your own Facebook profile is never altered by Xobni, and all Facebook privacy settings are strictly followed when viewing other profiles.

I'd like to duplicate this functionality. However, I can't figure out which API call they're using. I'm assuming when they say "encrypted email address" that's laymen's terms for the email hash. Once a username is derived, the graph api looks ideal for actually fetching the image, but I'm having trouble going from email hash to profile ID.

Best Answer

You can query the following URL to get user id (if one exists on Facebook):

https://graph.facebook.com/search?access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN&q=EMAIL_ADDRESS_URL_ENCODED&type=user

Then <img src="https://graph.facebook.com/USER_ID/picture"> gives you the picture.

More info: article at codinglogs.com

Related Solutions

Php – Facebook API – How to get a Facebook user’s profile image through the Facebook API (without requiring the user to “Allow” the application)

Simply fetch the data through this URL:

http://graph.facebook.com/userid_here/picture

Replace userid_here with id of the user you want to get the photo of. You can also use HTTPS as well.

You can use the PHP's file_get_contents function to read that URL and process the retrieved data.

Resource:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

Note: In php.ini, you need to make sure that the OpenSSL extension is enabled to use thefile_get_contents function of PHP to read that URL.

Facebook – Find Facebook user (url to profile page) by known email address

The definitive answer to this is from Facebook themselves. In post today at https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/335452696581712 a Facebook dev says

The ability to pass in an e-mail address into the "user" search type was
removed on July 10, 2013. This search type only returns results that match
a user's name (including alternate name).

So, alas, the simple answer is you can no longer search for users by their email address. This sucks, but that's Facebook's new rules.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Php – Facebook API – How to get a Facebook user’s profile image through the Facebook API (without requiring the user to “Allow” the application)

Facebook – Find Facebook user (url to profile page) by known email address

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