Facebook Images & TimThumb

[jetdiscos]

Hi,

Basically i'm trying to get am image using facebook graph and then crop it to 200px x 200px. Becuse i'm using wordpress i'm trying to use TimThumb to do the resize. This seems to work for a standard image well but using the facebook image, a dynamic one, it doesn't seem to work. I think because it uses a 302 redirect.

Is there anyway to solve this? I've tried encoding the url using php url_encode() but that didn't work.


Thanks

J

[Ron]

Are you able to actually get the image into a variable (or directly into TimThumb(don't know that software)) with something like file_get_contents()?

$tempImage = file_get_contents("http://someFbAddy");
TimThumb ($tempImage);
//or
Timthumb(file_get_contents("http://someFbAddy"),whatever); 

I'm pretty sure that native PHP functions will follow redirects, so IF that's your problem you might be able to solve it in some manner such as this. If TimThumb needs a file or URL, you could write it to disk and then unlink it afterwards. Or you could cache.... whatever.

Good luck! Sounds like a fun project.

[Ron]

PS if the problem is that fb is protecting it's images, you might need to spoof to look like a browser, which might entail cookies and the whole nine yards. If that's the case, perhaps there's something out there already written that does this.

[Ron]

Skimming over TimThumb source code ( http://timthumb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/timthumb.php ) I see that it allows images from only certain domains and certain image types and a bunch of restrictions that I couldn't follow in just a couple of minutes. Be sure you've got all the domains that facebook uses for images included in the list of allowable external sites; perhaps you should just feed the file in yourself (maybe as in the examples I gave) to simplify the scenarios for failure, at least at first.