I’m working with the Telegram Bot API and need to fetch user profile pictures. When I look at the user object documentation, I don’t see any photo_id field available. Is there a method or endpoint that allows me to get a user’s profile picture? I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while but can’t find the right approach. Any suggestions on how to access user avatars would be really helpful.
The getUserProfilePhotos method works fine, but here’s something useful - you can use offset and limit parameters to control which photos you get. Most apps just want the current profile pic, so set limit to 1 and you’ll grab the latest one without extra data transfer. Just remember the file_id expires after a while. I store file_ids temporarily and fetch fresh ones when I need them instead of caching the actual image URLs since they go invalid pretty quickly.
getUserProfilePhotos is the right method, but here’s what I learned implementing it. You’ll get back an array since users can have multiple profile pics, so handle that. Some users set their photos to private or don’t have any - the array comes back empty in those cases, so add error handling. You need two API calls: getUserProfilePhotos gets you the file_id, then getFile gets the actual file path. Don’t forget to combine that file path with your bot token to build the download URL.
try using getUserProfilePhotos and pass the user_id. it returns UserProfilePhotos object with photos. get the file_id from the result, then use getFile to get the URL. it helped me when i faced this issue too.