Profile image broken on old posts

[cdmoyer]

I didn't dig in to this too much, just noticed this in my recent insights:

http://thinkup.inarow.net/?u=CDMoyer&n=twitter&d=2013-12-18&s=posts_on_this_day_popular_flashback

Image url: http://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/583236690/cdm_eyebrows_normal.jpg

I assume this is because I changed my profile image recently, and twitter deleted the old one, but it's cached with the tweet. Not sure what the best way to handle this would be.

[anildash]

That seems to be right. The "right" solution would probably be for us to find a way to cache avatars locally, but that seems like a pretty large project. Interestingly, the vast majority of avatars appear to still be online, so I wonder if there's a way we could at least track for patterns of avatars that fail, whether it's by date or for particular URL patterns.

[markpasc]

Not sure if Twitter started deleting them more aggressively but lots of avatar images appear broken for me since a few months ago. They do seem to mostly be old avatars that were replaced, as when I do a new API request for those tweets, the user's profile_image_url has a different filename.

As you'd expect this is more a problem in the Favorite Flashback insight:

[shahdevansh]

Instead of caching the images of avatars, we could use the users/show call from twitter's API v1.1 https://api.twitter.com/1.1/users/show.json?screen_name=xyz The request returns profile image in profile_image_url