Foursquare API for venue user image error

Question

The Foursquare API has divided its photo tag for user as prefix and suffix. But if I merge them to form a full image URL and paste this in my browser, gives me errors that says the image can't be displayed because it contains errors. Is it because server is temporarily unavailable or anything else?

I am using the API for Venue Detail.

I got the data like this

user: {

id: "26534686"
firstName: "Bobbi"
lastName: "E."
photo: {
    prefix: "https://irs3.4sqi.net/img/user/"
    suffix: "/K4VCI4MXHWFUGXOF.jpg"
}
}
visibility: "public" 

But when I call this url https://irs3.4sqi.net/img/user/K4VCI4MXHWFUGXOF.jpg gives me error.

Any clue?

Answer 1

I don't know its right or not to show the way to Foursquare. But what I have investigated that Foursquare creates thumbnails of sizes 30 x 30 and 110 x 110 etc.

I formed the image path like this for small image

user->photo->prefix.'30x30'.user->photo->suffix; 

for larger size

user->photo->prefix.'110x110'.user->photo->suffix; 

That is I have concatenated them with (30x30) and (110x110).

Thus the above image becomes https://irs3.4sqi.net/img/user/30x30/K4VCI4MXHWFUGXOF.jpg and https://irs3.4sqi.net/img/user/110x110/K4VCI4MXHWFUGXOF.jpg which are valid till now.

Hope this will work until they change this.

Answer 2

As per the Foursquare documentation that is now updated:

To assemble a resolvable photo URL, take prefix + size + suffix, e.g. https://irs0.4sqi.net/img/general/300x500/2341723_vt1Kr-SfmRmdge-M7b4KNgX2_PHElyVbYL65pMnxEQw.jpg.

size can be one of the following, where XX or YY is one of 36, 100, 300, or 500.

• XXxYY
• original: the original photo's size
• capXX: cap the photo with a width or height of XX (whichever is larger). Scales the other, - smaller dimension proportionally
• widthXX: forces the width to be XX and scales the height proportionally
• heightYY: forces the height to be YY and scales the width proportionally

Answer 3

This is a change foursquare did on June 9th, see AK announcement on the google group here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/foursquare-api/MpNpdO5zARU

To fix it, in your request change the 'v' to a value below 20120609, 20120608 will work and return a url (json string) with the thumbnail of the user picture.

There is no documentation on how to use the prefix/suffix thing yet.. they will probably post about it when there will be.

Found out you can also access it via [prefix]/original/[suffix], and then use the newer version (>20120609)