How to retrieve older Whatsapp profile picture?

Question

I'm trying to retrieve an older (not older than 2 weeks) WhatsApp profile picture but I can't find the convenient solution.

The WA link to a PP is like https://dyn.web.whatsapp.com/pp?t=l&u=[PHONE_NUMBER]%40c.us&i=[AUTO_INCREMENTED_NUMBER]. If I have to check every incremented number I'll be dead and still without the picture.

Is there any way to search for the absolute path of that image file or to search for a specific phone number? Or any other solution to retrieve an older profile picture without spending a life time.

Answer 1

I appreciate that this is resurrecting a slightly old thread, but I thought I'd add my experiences.

First off, for a group (as opposed to a single contact), the [PHONE_NUMBER] field is [PHONE_NUMBER-EPOCH_TIMESTAMP_OF_GROUP_CREATION]. Similarly the [AUTO_INCREMENTED_NUMBER] is actually [EPOCH_TIMESTAMP_OF_UPLOAD_TIME].

It's relatively easy to find the timestamp of a particular date/time.

However, it appears that Whatsapp deletes the old icons when new ones are uploaded. I created a test group, added an icon, which I could navigate to with the URL format as above, then added a new icon (which could be accessed via its own URL), but the original URL now returned a blank page.