How do you get the "images" from a twitter feed to show in an iOS app

Question

I have a code that accesses a Twitter feed and puts the text into a table. I then edited the code so I could display the text in my custom fashion in separate views, but I wanted to grab images from the tweets as well, and despite over an hour searching could not find a single reference. I have seen how to "Post" images, but to be clear, I need to get and "display" the images from the tweet in question.

Here are the highlights from my code that handles the Twitter Access:

-(void)twitterTimeLine
{
    ACAccountStore *account = [[ACAccountStore alloc] init];

    ACAccountType *accountType = [account accountTypeWithAccountTypeIdentifier:ACAccountTypeIdentifierTwitter];

    [account requestAccessToAccountsWithType:accountType options:nil completion:^(BOOL granted, NSError *error) {
        if (granted == YES)
        {
            NSArray *arrayOfAccounts = [account accountsWithAccountType:accountType];

            if ([arrayOfAccounts count] > 0)
            {
                ACAccount *twitterAccount = [arrayOfAccounts lastObject];   // last account on list of accounts
                NSURL *requestAPI = [NSURL URLWithString:@"https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json"];


                NSMutableDictionary *parameters = [[NSMutableDictionary alloc] init];

                [parameters setObject:@"30" forKey:@"count"];

                [parameters setObject:@"1" forKey:@"incude_entities"];

                SLRequest *posts = [SLRequest requestForServiceType:SLServiceTypeTwitter requestMethod:SLRequestMethodGET URL:requestAPI parameters:parameters];

                posts.account = twitterAccount;

                [posts performRequestWithHandler:^(NSData *response, NSHTTPURLResponse *urlResponse, NSError *error) {
                    if (response)
                    {
                        // TODO: might want to check urlResponse.statusCode to stop early
                        NSError *jsonError;  // use new instance here, you don't want to overwrite the error you got from the SLRequest
                        NSArray *array =[NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:response options:NSJSONReadingMutableLeaves error:&jsonError];
                        if (array) {
                            if ([array isKindOfClass:[NSArray class]]) {
                                self.array = array;
                                NSLog(@"resulted array: %@",self.array);
                            }
                            else {
                                // This should never happen
                                NSLog(@"Not an array! %@ - %@", NSStringFromClass([array class]), array);
                            }
                        }
                        else {
                            // TODO: Handle error in release version, don't just dump out this information
                            NSLog(@"JSON Error %@", jsonError);
                            NSString *dataString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:response encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
                            NSLog(@"Received data: %@", dataString ? dataString : response);    // print string representation if response is a string, or print the raw data object
                        }
                    }
                    else {
                        // TODO: show error information to user if request failed
                        NSLog(@"request failed %@", error);
                    }

                    self.array = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:response options:NSJSONReadingMutableLeaves error:&error];

                    if (self.array.count != 0)
                    {
                        dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
                            [self.tableView reloadData];    // this part loads into table - important!
                        });

                    }
                }];
            }
        }
        else
        {
            NSLog(@"%@", [error localizedDescription]);
        }

    }];
}

and here is how I display the Tweet

-(UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    static NSString *cellID = @"cellID";

    UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:cellID];

    if (cell == nil)
    {
        cell = [[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:cellID];
    }

    NSDictionary *tweet = _array[indexPath.row];

    cell.textLabel.text = tweet[@"text"];
    //NSString *element = [myArray objectAtIndex:2];
    //NSString *element = myArray[2];


// I created some custom views to show the text, but kept the table for testing purposes
    TemplateView *tempView = [viewArray objectAtIndex:testCounter];
    tempView.TweetView.text = tweet[@"text"];
    // -> this was what I was hoping for // tempView.ContentView.image = tweet[@"image"];
    testCounter++;
    if (testCounter >= 30)
    {
        testCounter = 0;
    }

    return cell;
}

I took out the key lines that I think is where I need to look:

tempView.TweetView.text = tweet[@"text"];
tempView.ContentView.image = tweet[@"image"];

// hoping that the latter would work as the first one does, but clearly it's not that simple

This might not be possible, if so, how would I get the images from the "link" (url) and make sure it is an image and not a video or other website?

I could set up a "word search" to grab text starting with http from the tweet and hopefully generate a URL from the string

Answer 1

TwitterKit doesn't seem to support images publicly.. I'm having the same stupid issue. The API internally holds images when using the built in tableview and datasource.. It requires a listID and a Slug.. However, when you want the images via JSON, you are out of luck! Even TWTRTweet object doesn't have entities or media properties!

Not sure how anyone can develop such an awful API.. In any case, I reversed the server calls made internally and found that it sends other "undocumented" parameters..

Example:

TWTRAPIClient *client = [[TWTRAPIClient alloc] init];

NSString *endpoint = @"https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json";

NSDictionary *params = @{@"screen_name":@"SCREEN_NAME_HERE",
                             @"count": @"30"};

will return NO MEDIA.. even if you have @"include_entities" : @"true".

Solution:

TWTRAPIClient *client = [[TWTRAPIClient alloc] init];

NSString *endpoint = @"https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json";

NSDictionary *params = @{@"screen_name":@"SCREEN_NAME_HERE",
                         @"count": @"30",
                         @"tweet_mode": @"extended"};

With tweet_mode set to extended (tweet_mode is an undocumented parameter), it will now return the media as part of the response.. This includes the "type" which is "photo" for images.

Answer 2

We can get tweets with images by applying "filter=images" query with "include_entities=true". It'll give tweets with media entities, under which we can see type="photo" and other related data.

For ex: https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=nature&include_entities=true&filter=images

Try this query at twitter developer console and see the response format: https://dev.twitter.com/rest/tools/console

Hope this will help.