Save images from Url

Using Curl you can easily get a picture from an url. This technique isn't used very often but when you combine it with the new socialgraph API from facebook you can very easily create interactive facebook based applications. (example: a personalized holiday card with a facebook picture from your friends)

You can get any facebook profile picture with a simple url call. So you can grab the profile picture from the url, save it on your server and attach it to a mail,video, flash,... . And you've got your personlized holidaycard.

First we grab the facebook profile picture. Replace 560940 with the facebook profile Id of your choice.

https://graph.facebook.com/560940/picture

Now that we've got the picture we can save it locally with Curl. We can use the following code to loop trough an array $img containing the picture_id and the picture_url. The other parameter $fullpath is the path where you want to save the image. We loop the array with foreach, create a filename based on the picture_id and write the file

function save_picture($img,$fullpath){

    foreach($img as $key=>$value ){

    /* Generate a filename */

    $filename = $fullpath ."/".$key.'.jpg';

    /* Save picture in map with Curl */

    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$value);
    $fp = fopen($filename, 'w');
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
    curl_exec ($ch);
    curl_close ($ch);
    fclose($fp);

}

}

We now have all our facebook pictures saved on our server and can use them in various applications.

Note from facebook private policy:

"Information set to everyone is publicly available information, just like your name, profile picture, and connections.  Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations. Such information may also be associated with you, including your name and profile picture, even outside of Facebook, such as on public search engines and when you visit other sites on the internet.  The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to everyone. You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete everyone content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook."