How do I find the timestamp of all the Facebook "likes" of an event photo?

Question

From various postings I know that the timestamp of a 'like' is stored by FB, notably from here:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/opengraph/action-type/og.likes/

But what I'm having trouble getting clear is how, given a photo that's been posted to an event, I would get all the picture's likes and the time each like was created (and of course, by who).

As far as I can tell it would have to go something like this:

1. Get each user invited to event.
2. Get each user's likes.
3. Check if any of the fbid's of the likes match any of the event photos' id's.

But surely step 2 would necessitate me logging in on behalf of each invited user and anyway, wouldn't the above really poll FB too much? So I am assuming my procedure is incorrect.

Could anyone tell me what the fql would be to get a photo of an event and then the users who like the photo and then the timestamp of the like?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Short answer, you can't. The FQL or Graph API doesn't provide such information.

There are two things to differentiate in Facebook for developers:

1. The FQL or Graph API, which lets developers access the Facebook data (it means everything hosted on Facebook servers and saved in Facebook databases) like events, photos, videos, posts, etc.
2. Open Graph, which lets apps tell on Facebook what happened on the app side : we are talking about the app's own content and requests.

When trying to grab information from an event (content managed by Facebook), you are in the first case. As you can see here, here or here, likes are never described by a timestamp.

What you saw here deals with Open Graph, which can't be applied on Facebook events.