How to update Twitter profile picture using twitter api and data:image/gif;base64?

Question

iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAABGdBTUEAALGPC/xhBQAAAAlwSFlzAAALEwAACxMBAJqcGAAAAAd0SU1FB9YGARc5KB0XV+IAAAAddEVYdENvbW1lbnQAQ3JlYXRlZCB3aXRoIFRoZSBHSU1Q72QlbgAAAF1JREFUGNO9zL0NglAAxPEfdLTs4BZM4DIO4C7OwQg2JoQ9LE1exdlYvBBeZ7jqch9//q1uH4TLzw4d6+ErXMMcXuHWxId3KOETnnXXV6MJpcq2MLaI97CER3N0vr4MkhoXe0rZigAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==

The above data is a picture in data:image/png;base64 format. Is it possible to update a twitter profile picture without providing the path to the image (like http://....com ) but instead by providing the image data in the format above?

Answer 1

Yes, it's documented https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/account/update_profile_image and https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/post/account/update_profile_background_image

Sending something via base64_encode(file_get_contents($image_path)))) will yield results. Make sure your file is <700kb and smaller than <1000px.

Answer 2

Having had a quick look at the Twitter Documentation, specifically the section regarding Updating a User's Profile Image , it does not clearly state whether it will, or will not accept a Base64-encoded string for an image.

That being said, I would presume that it would not (feel free to test it and see if it does, but, as a rule, if an API wants a URL as an input, it will only recognise a URL as valid).

You could, of course, create a PHP script on your server, which, using the PHP function imagecreatefromstring() [ PHP Docs ] and then use that URI as the value for the Twitter API.