Building Twitter profile image url with Twitter user id - twitter

Question

Is there any way of building a profile image url with user id or screen name? I store user ids in database but i don't want to store profile image url.
edit:
I don't want to make a api call too. I want to put user_id inside a url like
<img src="https://twitter.com/users/profile_pic?user_id=123"> Is there a url to do this?

Answer 1

With API 1.1 you can achieve this using these URLs:
https://twitter.com/[screen_name]/profile_image?size=mini
https://twitter.com/[screen_name]/profile_image?size=normal
https://twitter.com/[screen_name]/profile_image?size=bigger
https://twitter.com/[screen_name]/profile_image?size=original
Official twitter documentation Profile Images and Banners
Example
https://twitter.com/TwitterEng/profile_image?size=original
will redirect to
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/875168599299637248/84CkAq6s.jpg

Answer 2

As of June 2020, both the accepted answer and avatars.io no longer work. Here are two alternatives:
unavatar.io
(formerly unavatar.now.sh)
Unavatar can get pictures from quite a few different places including Twitter. Replace [screen_name] in the URL below with the Twitter username you want.
<img src="https://unavatar.io/twitter/[screen_name]" />
For example:
<img src="https://unavatar.io/twitter/jack" width="100" height"100" />
If the demo above ever stops working, it's probably because unavatar.io is no longer available.
Unavatar is open source though, so if it does go down, you can deploy it yourself from the GitHub repo — it even has "Deploy to Vercel/Heroku" buttons. The code to fetch Twitter avatars specifically is here, so you could also use that as part of your own backend.
twivatar.glitch.me
⚠️ As of July 2021 this option no longer works, see the one above instead!
If you want an alternative, you can also use twivatar.glitch.me. Replace [screen_name] in the URL below with the Twitter username you want.
<img src="https://twivatar.glitch.me/[screen_name]" />
For example:
<img src="https://twivatar.glitch.me/jack" width="100" height"100" />
If the demo above ever stops working, it's probably because twivatar.glitch.me is no longer available.
By the way, I didn't build either of these services, they were both made by other people.

Answer 3

Introducing the easiest way to get a Twitter Profile Image without using the Twitter API:
Using http://avatars.io/
As #AlexB, #jfred says, it doesn't work at all on mobile devices.
And it's quite a hard way to get a redirected URL using common frameworks like PHP or JavaScript in your single page.
Simply call http://avatars.io/twitter/ruucm at your image tag, like
<img src="https://avatars.io/twitter/ruucm" alt="twt_profile" border="0" width="259"/>
I've tested it with Angular 2+ and it works without any problem.

Answer 4

As of February 20, 2020 it would appear this is impossible. Using the API seems like the only option at the moment. For more info see my question I've opened here: Twitter profile picture images now blocked on most domains

Answer 5

Based on the answer by #Cristiana214
The following PHP snippet can be used to make the https://twitter.com/[screen_name]/profile_image?size=normal trick work on mobile.
Due to twitters redirect to the mobile version of the site links such as https://twitter.com/[screen_name]/profile_image?size=normal get broken on mobile devices
So the script gets the redirect response (to the user avatar) extracts the address then redirects the page itself
if (!isset($_GET['id'])) $_GET['id'] = 'twitter';
$urlget = curl_init();
curl_setopt($urlget, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://twitter.com/' . $_GET['id'] . '/profile_image?size=normal');
curl_setopt($urlget, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
curl_setopt($urlget, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$res = curl_exec($urlget);
preg_match_all("/location: (.*)/", $res, $found);
header('Location: ' . $found[1][0]);
So this could be accesses as twitteravatar.php?id=twitter which (at time of writing) reloads to https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/767879603977191425/29zfZY6I_normal.jpg
Not pretty but works.

Answer 6

You can get it using the users/show method of the Twitter API -- it does exactly what you described. You give it a the ID or the screen name, and it returns a bunch of data, including profile_image_url.

Answer 7

I found such a solution with C#:
public string Text_toTextFinder(string text, string Fromhere, string Here)
{
int start = text.IndexOf(Fromhere) + Fromhere.Length;
int finish = text.IndexOf(Here, start);
return text.Substring(start, finish - start);
}
string getPhotoURL(string UserName, string size ="x96")
{
using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
{
client.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.UserAgent] = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.874.121 Safari/535.2";
string htmlCode = client.DownloadString("https://twitter.com/" + UserName);
return Text_toTextFinder(Text_toTextFinder(htmlCode, "<td class=\"avatar\">", "</td>"), "src=\"", "\"").Replace("normal",size);
}
}
For use:
MessageBox.Show(getPhotoURL("screen_name")); //size = 96x96
MessageBox.Show(getPhotoURL("screen_name","normal"));
MessageBox.Show(getPhotoURL("screen_name","200x200"));
MessageBox.Show(getPhotoURL("screen_name","400x400"));

Answer 8

There is no way to do that. In fact Twitter doesn't provide a url to do that like facebook does ( https://graph.facebook.com//?fields=picture)
The issue is report but the status is: 'WontFix', take a look:
https://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?can=2&start=0&num=100&q=&colspec=ID%20Stars%20Type%20Bug%20Status%20Summary%20Opened%20Modified%20Component&groupby=&sort=&id=242#makechanges

Answer 9

Well I'm using a tricky way via PHP Dom Parser
include('simple_html_dom.php');
$html = file_get_html('http://twitter.com/mnckry');
$img = array();
foreach($html->find('img.size73') as $e)
$img[] = $e->src;
foreach($html->find('.profile-header-inner') as $e)
$img[] = str_replace("')", "", str_replace("url('", "", $e->{'data-background-image'}));
echo $img[0];//Avatar
echo "<br>";
echo end($img);//ProfileBG
This will give you something like this;
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/378800000487958092/e04a191de329fcf8d000ca03073ad594_bigger.png
to get 2 other size; for big version remove, "_bigger" for smaller version replace "_bigger" with "_normal"

Answer 10

With version 1.1, use
http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/XXXXX/afpecvf41m8f0juql78p_normal.png
where XXXXX is the User Id