How to send images and track user count in PHP Telegram bot?

Other Questions Telegram bot
1

I’m building a Telegram bot using PHP and need help with two features. Here’s my current bot code:

<?php
$input = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'));

function processMessage($message) {
    if($message == 'Hello')
        $response = 'Hello there!';
    if($message == 'What is your name?')
        $response = 'I am ChatBot';
    if($message == 'How are you?')
        $response = 'I am doing well, thank you!';
    return $response;
}

$bot_token = 'YOUR_BOT_TOKEN';
$api_url = 'https://api.telegram.org/bot' . $bot_token . '/sendMessage?chat_id=' . $chat_id;
$api_url .= '&text=' . $response;
$result = file_get_contents($api_url);
?>

I need to add two more features:

  1. Sending photos: How can I make my bot send an image from a URL when users request it?

  2. User tracking: How do I store user IDs in a database and count total users? I want to show member count when someone sends /stats command and increment the counter when new users send /start.

Any help with implementing these features would be great!

2

yo mike, for images use sendPhoto instead of sendMessage: https://api.telegram.org/bot{token}/sendPhoto?chat_id={chat_id}&photo={url}. for user tracking just create a mysql table with chat_ids and check if they exist before inserting. make sure you parse the input and grab the chat_id from the json first

3

Your code has several issues to fix before adding features. The $chat_id and $response variables aren’t defined from the input. Extract them from the JSON first: $chat_id = $input->message->chat->id and $text = $input->message->text. For photos, use the sendPhoto endpoint with proper URL encoding. For user tracking, set up a simple SQLite database with a users table - just chat_id and join_date columns. When someone sends /start, check if they exist with a SELECT query. If they’re new, insert them and bump your counter. For /stats, count the total rows. Don’t forget to handle different message types in your main processing function.

4

The other answers miss some key details. When sending images, handle the API response differently - sendPhoto doesn’t work like sendMessage. Use cURL instead of file_get_contents. You’ll get better error handling and proper POST requests.

For the database stuff, set up PDO with prepared statements. Don’t skip this - it prevents SQL injection attacks.

When you build the stats feature, store a first_seen timestamp too. Trust me, you’ll want that data for analytics later.

Your message processing code needs work. Switch to a switch statement or array mapping - it’s way cleaner than what you’ve got now.

One more thing: validate that input JSON exists before processing it. Otherwise you’ll get PHP warnings every time the webhook receives bad data.