I’m working on a Telegram bot and I need some help with handling images. When someone sends a picture to my bot, is there a way to get a direct URL to that image? I’ve been looking through the documentation but I’m not sure if this is possible.
Right now I’m thinking I might have to download the image file and store it on my own server, but that seems like extra work if I can just get a URL instead. I want to process these images in my application and having URLs would make things much easier.
Has anyone dealt with this before? What’s the best approach for handling user-submitted photos in Telegram bots? Any advice would be really helpful.
Telegram’s Bot API doesn’t give you direct image URLs for user uploads - this threw me off when I started with bots. You’ve got to use the file_id from the photo message, call getFile, then download through Telegram’s servers. Their download URLs are temporary and have your bot token in them, so you can’t store or share those. I just download incoming images right away and save them to cloud storage like AWS S3 or Google Cloud. That way I get permanent URLs for my app. It’s an extra step you can’t avoid, but once you’ve got the download and storage pipeline set up, it’s pretty manageable.
Unfortunately, you cannot obtain direct URLs for images that users send to your Telegram bot. The process involves obtaining a file_id reference from the message containing the photo and then using the getFile method to download the image file. I faced the same situation while developing my photo bot last year. Essentially, you will have to download the file using Telegram’s API and store it on your own server. It’s worth noting that even if you were able to generate URLs, they tend to expire quickly, making it impractical for long-term use. Therefore, most developers prefer to handle the files by implementing appropriate storage solutions.
yeah, there’s no direct url option. Telegram doesn’t expose image links for privacy reasons. what I do is grab the file_id when someone sends a pic, then immediately fetch it with getFile and push to my CDN. takes about 2 seconds extra but then you’ve got proper urls that won’t expire.