I’m building an email client that connects to Gmail through their API. I want to show profile pictures for people who send emails, but I’m having trouble figuring out how to get these images.
I can authenticate users with oauth2 and request whatever permissions I need. The problem is I only have email addresses from the messages, but I need to somehow get the profile photos that go with those addresses.
I tried a few different approaches but none worked well. The Google+ API can return profile images, but it wants a specific user ID that I don’t have. The contacts API only shows pictures for people in the user’s contact list, not for random email senders.
Other email apps seem to do this successfully, so there must be a way. Has anyone figured out how to convert a Gmail address into a profile picture? I’m willing to use any Google API that can help with this.
You’ll want the Google People API for this. The people.searchContacts method lets you search by email and grab profile photos when they’re available. This only works if the sender made their profile discoverable or they’re already in your contacts. For unknown senders, you’re pretty limited because Google blocks public access to profile photos. Most email clients showing profile images use cached contact data, other services like LinkedIn’s API, or fallbacks like Gravatar. I’ve found combining the People API for known contacts with Gravatar works well for getting a decent range of images, though privacy-focused users will still show up as default placeholders.
This is a pretty common problem and there’s no perfect fix. I ran into the same thing - Google blocks direct access to profile photos for privacy reasons. Here’s what worked for me: set up a fallback system. First, check if the sender’s in your authenticated user’s Google contacts via the Contacts API. Then try the People API’s searchContacts method. If both fail, fall back to Gravatar. The game-changer was caching results locally so you’re not hitting APIs repeatedly. Some commercial email clients use their own databases of scraped public images, but that’s legally sketchy. Bottom line: you’ll probably only get profile photos for 20-30% of senders using legit methods.
i think gravatar is ur best bet for this. just md5 hash the email and use that on gravatar.com/avatar/[hash]. it’s simpler than messing with google’s apis. not everyone has one but u’ll find a good amount of profile pics this way!