Getting followers' display pictures without users/profile_image/

Smenus · 2011-10-20T17:54:04.000Z

I’ve posted in here as I know that it’s possible, but I’m not sure whether it counts as circumventing Twitter’s limitations.

Basically, I’m trying to build an app that goes through a user’s address book (on iOS 5), and fills in display pictures for anyone who has a username set and is in the user’s friends. To get the display picture, the obvious call is users/profile_image/. However, as that only gets one picture at a time, and is rate-limited (and doesn’t do OAuth, so the limit is 150), it seems like it’d be more efficient to use users/lookup.

users/lookup returns profile_image_url, and I know that you can strip the _normal from the end to get the image that’d be returned by users/profile_image/username?size=original

My question - does that count as circumventing the limitation set by Twitter?

Regards,
Sean.

episod · 2011-10-20T18:00:34.000Z

Using users/lookup as you suggest really is the best option for this task – wouldn’t count as circumventing rate limits at all. The users/profile_image end point really exists as an in-context convenience method – obtaining data quickly in bulk is the perfect task for users/lookup.

Smenus · 2011-10-20T18:02:12.000Z

Awesome, thank you for the super quick reply!