I have a facebook token which is getting the graph.facebook.com/me/home url just fine. On posts with pictures, I would like to pull out the picture ID from the post so I can get detailed information about the sizes and urls to different images.
The problem is that on this feed, I don't see any "privacy" fields for most users. But the way these URLs work vary widely. For example, a photo can be viewed while logged out of facebook. A photo can be viewed as long as you are logged in as anyone. A photo is private. When I query graph.facebook.com/(photoID) most of the time I get false. Is there some permission that I should be getting from users that I don't have here? Is this restricted not by the user perhaps but by the permission of the friend's photo? I noticed that in at least one case, I cold only get "false" on a photoID, but logged in to my personal account (not knowing this person at all) I could see their photo fine. These inconsistent levels of security are confusing to me.
I would like a way to tell what kind of link this is going to be before I bother querying the photoID or sending the URL on for further processing. Is there a way to force an extra field on the feed or is there some field that contains the data that I'm just not seeing?
Its not exactly made clear by facebook.
Unfortunately, just because you don't have permission to look at a pictures details via the API doesn't mean you can't view the image. As far as I know, or the documentation explains, there is no way to know without attempting to display the picture to the user.
Either way, the API wouldn't return pictures the requesting user can't see, and I'm pretty sure caching the image's url for other users would be a violation of the ToS.