CODEWITHSUNDEEP
facebookfacebook-graph-apifacebook-fql
JoshDG
JoshDG

Reputation: 3931

Facebook Graph / Fql: Get all pics

I'm having return issues with graph API and I'm wondering if any knows why or how I can fix it.

I need to download all photo data for a given user (friend data, not the active user). Here are the two things I have tried. 

FQL: "select pid from photo where subject=friend_uid"
Graph: "friend_uid/photos?fields=picture,created_time,tags.fields(name,id)&limit=1000"

I have friends_photos and user_photos permissions.

Any users with > 1000 tags will have drastically reduced result numbers. For example, it will only return around 200 photos or so which is not acceptable, I need all of them

Chunking with since/until (or created_time < or > __) as well as limit clauses only improves the result count with FQL but the amount of chunking makes it VERY inefficient.

Any ideas? The tag data is also important for my purposes.

So, I need the proper query or sequence of queries to obtain ALL tag data for all photos of a given user_id using either FQL or graph-api.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1220

Answers (1)

Zane
Zane

Reputation: 4752

I recently created a similar project (pulls all the photos from all your facebook friends in order) in PHP. Facebook's limits are poorly documented but I found that with the Graph API, it's 400 photos the friend is tagged in and 5000 photos the friend uploaded per request. Note that pulling from {user}/photos only pulled photos they are tagged in, while {user}/photos/uploaded only pulls photos that {user} uploaded. I figured that that 400 tagged and 5000 uploaded photos was enough for my situation.

If you do need additional photos, you will have to check the number of returned photos for the user for the /photos request and check if it's equal to 400. If so, you will have to go on to the next page, recursively.

For the /photos/uploaded request, Facebook uses cursor-based pagination (see bottom of this page), which means that pagination->next and pagination->prev data is only sent when there are more values to return. This makes it fairly easy to get the next page (once again you will have to do this recursively).

Upvotes: 3

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