Twitter user picture sizes

[Dave Briccetti]

Hi. I’ve searched around for 1/2 hour or so, and haven’t found an
authoritative explanation of the sizes of pictures, and how to
retrieve them.

It seems that profile_image_url leads to a tiny picture:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/66123958/IMG_0534_twitter500_normal.jpg

But there is also a slighter bigger version:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/66123958/IMG_0534_twitter500_bigger.jpg

And then a proper full-size one:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/66123958/IMG_0534_twitter500.jpg

Am I correct in this? That the big version URL can be derived from
that in profile_image_url by dropping the _normal from the name? Is
this part of the API spec? Safe to use?

Thanks.

[Alex Payne]

Yes, that's safe to use. If it changes, we'll let people know. And
yes, we'll move to a saner URL naming scheme w/r/t profile images.

--
Alex Payne - API Lead, Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/al3x

[Dave Briccetti]

This is odd. For some reason, this “thumbnail” is huge. Shouldn’t they
all be small?

http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/80449987/JavaPosse_normal.png

[atebits]

They should - I believe there was an issue at one point where profile
images weren't being scaled down properly. It's fixed now, but old
(broken) avatars remain broken. That user needs to re-upload their
profile image.

On Mar 1, 7:51 pm, Dave Briccetti <da...@davebsoft.com> wrote:
> This is odd. For some reason, this “thumbnail” is huge. Shouldn’t they
> all be small?
>

> http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/80449987/Ja...

[Jason Schroeder]

Hi Alex,

Any hope Twitter will re-size these existing images? Mobile clients
(i.e. TwitterBerry) expect a 48x48 image, not a bigger 256x256 image.
See http://twitter.com/users/show/davemorin.xml ->
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/81312415/dave_morin_256_normal.png
, a 256x256 png.

Thanks!

[Alex Payne]

Tried http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/81312415/dave_morin_256_mini.png
?

--

[Jason Schroeder]

That image is also 256x256px.

Cheers,
Jason


On Mar 17, 7:09 pm, Alex Payne <a...@twitter.com> wrote:
> Triedhttp://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/81312415/da...

> ?
>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 19:04, Jason Schroeder <jasch...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi Alex,
>
> > Any hope Twitter will re-size these existing images? Mobile clients
> > (i.e. TwitterBerry) expect a 48x48 image, not a bigger 256x256 image.
> > Seehttp://twitter.com/users/show/davemorin.xml->

> >http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/81312415/da...

[Jason Schroeder]

Any hope Twitter will re-size these existing images?

Thank you!
-Jason
TwitterBerry

[Alex Payne]

Checking with our UX team about that.

[Nick Arnett]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Alex Payne <al...@twitter.com> wrote:

Checking with our UX team about that.

Good... it's bugging me, too, because I display them on blog pages to show who has cited URLs.  In the meantime, I suppose it wouldn't be too much of a browser performance hit to resize those in the image tag.  Normal small icons seem to be 48x48 pixels.

Nick

[Shannon Whitley]

Don't forget the _mini. :)

This is my list:

(original)
_mini
_normal
_bigger

On Feb 25, 12:15 am, Dave Briccetti <da...@davebsoft.com> wrote:
> Hi. I’ve searched around for 1/2 hour or so, and haven’t found an
> authoritative explanation of the sizes of pictures, and how to
> retrieve them.
>
> It seems that profile_image_url leads to a tiny picture:

>  http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/66123958/IM...

>
> But there is also a slighter bigger version:

>  http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/66123958/IM...

>
> And then a proper full-size one:

>  http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/66123958/IM...

[Jason Schroeder]

Here is a 480x480 _normal image:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/108666778/IMG00099_normal.jpg

Any progress on working with the UX team to resize these? TwitterBerry
is expecting a 48x48-pixel image.

Cheers,
Jason
TwitterBerry

[Chad Etzel]

I've never written a BB app, but is there not a way to force the
display size of an image like you can in an html <img> tag?

...not that it would help the filesize issue associated with this problem.

-chad

[Andrew Maizels]

We'd really like to see a fix for this too. Having a few hundred
unexpectedly large images floating around is playing havoc with our
memory usage.

Regards,

Andrew Maizels
PeopleBrowsr

On Mar 26, 2:53 pm, Jason Schroeder <jasch...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here is a 480x480 _normal image:http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/108666778/I...

[Alex Payne]

It's one of our top issues right now.

--

[Zac Bowling]

Thanks Alex for making sure this gets taken care of. It's been driving
me nuts here chasing ghosts why my IO appears to be blocked when its
actually trying to just pull a massive image.

Basically I'm having all the same issue other are having... My IO
library doesn't make it easy to cancel a transfer that is partially
complete for our client (doable but increases the complexity a lot),
one big image can invalidate several older images in my cache engine
because of memory constraints and I don't want to write resizing code
before I put it in the cache, and it creates a bottleneck because our
client runs where bandwidth is usually small quiet often, etc, etc.
You know the deal :-)

Zac Bowling

[Zac Bowling]

Any news?

I'm still getting caught up on huge profile images (like this user
http://twitter.com/TheDiva who's profile image is 1024x768 and 324 KB)

Really hurting on the mobile side.

Zac Bowling

[mikejablonski]

Found another big one killing my scroll butter:
http://twitter.com/robjcain

On Apr 4, 6:01 pm, Zac Bowling <zbowl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any news?
>

> I'm still getting caught up on huge profile images (like this userhttp://twitter.com/TheDivawho's profile image is 1024x768 and 324 KB)

>
> Really hurting on the mobile side.
>
> Zac Bowling
>

> On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Zac Bowling <zbowl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks Alex for making sure this gets taken care of. It's been driving
> > me nuts here chasing ghosts why my IO appears to be blocked when its
> > actually trying to just pull a massive image.
>
> > Basically I'm having all the same issue other are having... My IO
> > library doesn't make it easy to cancel a transfer that is partially
> > complete for our client (doable but increases the complexity a lot),
> > one big image can invalidate several older images in my cache engine
> > because of memory constraints and I don't want to write resizing code
> > before I put it in the cache, and it creates a bottleneck because our
> > client runs where bandwidth is usually small quiet often, etc, etc.
> > You know the deal :-)
>
> > Zac Bowling
>

> > On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Alex Payne <a...@twitter.com> wrote:
>
> >> It's one of our top issues right now.
>

[Doug Williams]

I just pinged the developer who was supposed to be working on this and as he has had his hand on other fires this week. Thanks for the patience, we realize it is a pain.

Doug Williams
Twitter API Support
http://twitter.com/dougw

[caseyw]

I'm still seeing this problem, any ETA on it being fixed?

[Doug Williams]

I've updated issue 497's status [1]. The avatar upload functionality sits within the core Twitter.com application. The results of this feature (avatars and images) are made available by the API. The image upload logic is currently being rewritten by a member of the core team. Unfortunately we do not have a definite time when this fix will ship.

1. http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=497

Thanks,
Doug
--

Doug Williams
Twitter Platform Support
http://twitter.com/dougw