Starting with this article, I’m going to look at the methods concerned with photos, namely:

    * photos_get
    * photos_getAlbums
    * photos_getTags

In this article, I’ll look at the photos_getAlbums method.


photos_getAlbums

The photos_getAlbums method retrieves information about photo albums. It can:

    * Retrieve information about a given user’s photo albums
    * Retrieve information about any number of photo albums, given the photo albums’ IDs

In Facebook, photos don’t just exist on their own — every photo has to belong to an album. That’s why I’m covering this method first.

Input

photos_getAlbums takes two arguments — here’s its signature:


The parameters it expects are explained below:

Parameter	What It Is
$uid	[optional][integer] The ID of the user whose photo albums are to be retrieved. If no value is provided, the current user's photo albums will be retrieved.
$aids	[optional][array of integers] An array containing the IDs of phpto albums to retrieve. If no photo album IDs are given, the method will fetch all the albusm for the user specified in $uid.

Output

photos_getAlbums returns an array of associative arrays, with one element for each photo album. The associative array in each element is explained in the table below:

Array Element	What It Is
aid	Album ID - the unique identifier for the photo album.
cover_pid	Cover photo ID - the unique identifier for the album photo that will be used as the "cover" for the album.
owner	Owner ID - the ID of the user who owns the photo album.
name	The name of the photo album.
created	The date and time the photo album was created, expressed as a Unix timestamp in UTC time.
modified	The date and time the photo album was last modified, expressed as a Unix timestamp in UTC time.
description	A brief description of the photo album.
location	Text that explains where the photos in the album were taken.
link	The URL for the photo album's main page. Note: Unlike users and groups, you can't deduce a photo album's URL from its album ID. This is because the album ID isn't used as a parameter for an album's URL.
size	The number of photos in the album.

Getting the Current User’s Photo Albums

Let’s start with the simplest case, in which we want to retrieve information about the current user’s photo albums. Calling photos_getAlbums without any arguments does the job:


Here’s the output of that code, with me as the logged-in user. Naturally, your results will look different:


Getting the Photo Albums of a Specified User

In order to retrieve information about all the photo albums belonging to a user who isn’t the current user, you need to specify that user’s ID in the $uid parameter and set the $aids parameter to NULL (or simply don’t provide any value for it).

Let’s get a look at Robert Scoble’s photo albums. His user ID is 501319654, so the code to retrieve his photo albums looks like this:


Here are the results — it looks as though he’s got only one publicly viewable album:


Getting Information About One or More Arbitrary Photo Albums

Finally, let’s retrieve information about a couple of photo albums whose IDs are known. In this case, we specify the albums’ IDs in the $aids parameter and set the $uid parameter to NULL.

Suppose we want to fetch information about these two photo albums:

    * My “Accordion Hijinks” photo album, whose ID is 2421870240750127055
    * Robert Scoble’s photo album, whose ID is 2153151518772038259


Note that in the code, I put the photo album IDs in quotes. That’s because although the IDs are numeric, they’re too large to be represented as integers.

Here’s the output of the code:



Next Time…

In the next article, I’ll cover the photos_get method.





This material is a property of Joey deVilla. Please, visit his great blog for more Facebook stuff.

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