

Show HN: FaceGrab – Grab everyone's Facebook profile image without any login - aaggarwal
http://blog.ankitaggarwal.me/FaceGrab

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aaggarwal
Hi, FaceGrab lets you download anyone's Facebook full-size profile image from
their username or userid without any need for login. It uses Facebook's Graph
search.

This project was a code sprint. I started it when I needed an image set for a
machine learning problem. I came across a Facebook graph feature which returns
full-size profile images. I thought I could use this feature to
programmatically generate a data-set of actual images. I consulted Facebook
about the use of this feature as bug, they responded that the profile pictures
are public and its not their responsibility.

So, I created this to generate a data-set of Facebook profile images. I think
it could be useful for developers requiring a big image data-set for image
processing or machine learning applications, or maybe more. Any comments are
welcome.

~~~
kevin
What was the machine learning problem?

~~~
aaggarwal
I was taking an AI course in college, so I wanted to identify objects in an
image using Neural Networks, I was moderately successful, I will try to
improve in future. But, it was fun :)

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pinewurst
Someone really needs to create a Hot-or-Not clone using these for input, thus
bringing Facebook back to its beginnings.

World without end, amen.

~~~
aaggarwal
Hehe, I didn't have that in mind when I made this, I just wanted some images
to solve my problem. If you will use these for such tasks, I don't think you
will be let off as easy as Mr. Zuckerberg :)

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developer1
And if you want to scrape a list of Facebook usernames to use with this,
Facebook makes that easy too:
[https://www.facebook.com/directory/](https://www.facebook.com/directory/)

It's against the ToS to do so, but of course Facebook is willing to expose all
that information for anyone willing to break the rules.

~~~
aaggarwal
Actually, one doesn't need to scrape facebook usernames for getting an image
dataset, FaceGrab works with userids as well, so you can specify a range of
userids one wants to grab profile images of (e.g. 1-10000), and voila you will
get all the images saved. Be wary of your hard disk space though.

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lukevdp
Is there any way of getting the profile photo from an email address instead of
username?

~~~
aaggarwal
You can, but that will require additional work, first you will have to use the
search feature of facebook graph api to get the userid of the email address
and then finally, get the profile image from that userid using FaceGrab.

Now note, while getting the profile photo can be achieved without any login,
however, if you want to get userid of a user from email address, you would
require authorization token which you can get by logging in and creating a
facebook app.

