How to get OTHER users' photos and albums with Facebook Graph API

Question

Scenario: logged with my Facebook account and using a browser, I'm able to see some photos and albums of some users which aren't friends of mine (with a privacy setting of public or similar) and quite all their past profile photos. For example the URL

https://www.facebook.com/<userid>/photos_all shows those photos.

I want to replicate behaviour with Graph API but GETting

https://graph.facebook.com/<userid>/photos?access_token=...

Gives me an empty data array.

Same scenario using tagged or albums instead of photos

I've tried to use site scraping but FB website uses AJAX to populate gridview of photos, so It's very difficult.

On Graph API Explorer I've requested and use an access token with all permissions and also a debug access token but I'm still unable to get other users' photos.

It's possibile to get photos of users which aren't in friend list with Facebook Graph API? Am I missing something?

Answer 1

For privacy reasons, it´s not possible to get the photos of OTHER users with the API. Even for the authorized user, you need the user_photos permission.

Scraping is not allowed btw: https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php