Getting LinkedIn Profile Picture

Is there an easy way to grab a users LinkedIn profile photo?

Ideally similar to how you would with Facebook - http://graph.facebook.com/userid/picture

You can retrieve the original photo size with this call:

http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~/picture-urls::(original)

Note that this could be any size, so you'll need to do scaling on your side, but the image is the original one uploaded by the user.

Not as easy... You need to go through OAuth, then on behalf of the member, you ask for:

http://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/{user-id}/picture-url

If you use the 2.0 version of the API (all developers need to migrate by March 1, 2019), you should use projections to expand the profilePicture.displayImage. If you do this, you will have a full JSON element displayImage~ (the '~' is not a typo) inside profilePicture with all the info you may need.

https://api.linkedin.com/v2/me?projection=(id,profilePicture(displayImage~:playableStreams))

You can see more at the Profile Picture API doc to look at the JSON response or the Profile API doc.

Once the Linkedin user authentication using OAuth 2.x is done, make a request to the people URL.

> https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~:(id,email-address,first-name,last-name,formatted-name,picture-url)?format=json

Where ~ stands for current authenticated user. The response will be something like this ...

{
  "id": "KPxRFxLxuX",
  "emailAddress": "[email protected]",
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Doe",
  "formattedName": "John Doe",
  "pictureUrl": "https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mprx/0_0QblxThAqcTCt8rrncxxO5JAr...cjSsn6gRQ2b"
}

Hope this helps!

I'm using OWIN in my solution so after the user allows your application to use LinkedIn credentials a simple and plain GET request to URL https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~:(picture-URL)?format=json, as explained before with a Bearer authorization in request headers, solved my problems.

My Startup.Auth.cs file

var linkedInOptions = new LinkedInAuthenticationOptions()
{
   ClientId = [ClientID],
   ClientSecret = [ClientSecret],
   Provider = new LinkedInAuthenticationProvider()
   {
      OnAuthenticated = (context) =>
      {
          // This is the access token received by your application after user allows use LinkedIn credentials
          context.Identity.AddClaim(new Claim(
              "urn:linkedin:accesstoken", context.AccessToken));
          context.Identity.AddClaim(new Claim(
              "urn:linkedin:name", context.Name));
          context.Identity.AddClaim(new Claim(
              "urn:linkedin:username", context.UserName));
          context.Identity.AddClaim(new Claim(
              "urn:linkedin:email", context.Email));
          context.Identity.AddClaim(new Claim(
              "urn:linkedin:id", context.Id));

          return Task.FromResult(0);
      }
   }
};

app.UseLinkedInAuthentication(linkedInOptions);

My method to get the user's profile picture in LinkedIn:

public string GetUserPhotoUrl(string accessToken)
{
   string result = string.Empty;
   var apiRequestUri = new Uri("https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~:(picture-url)?format=json");
   using (var webClient = new WebClient())
   {
      webClient.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.Authorization, "Bearer " + accessToken);
      var json = webClient.DownloadString(apiRequestUri);
      dynamic x = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(json);
      string userPicture = x.pictureUrl;
      result = userPicture;
   }
   return result;
}

And finally a snippet of my action that consumes the method above:

public async Task<ActionResult> ExternalLoginCallback(string returnUrl)
{
   ...
   var externalIdentity = HttpContext.GetOwinContext().Authentication.GetExternalIdentityAsync(DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ExternalCookie);
   string accessToken =
               externalIdentity.Result.Claims.FirstOrDefault(c => c.Type == "urn:linkedin:accesstoken").Value;
   model.PhotoUrl = GetUserPhotoUrl(accessToken);
   ...
}

I hope it could help. Best regards

This works well for me!

Explained -

This is for a thumbnail with all other data-

https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~:(id,location,picture-urls::(original),specialties,public-profile-url,email-address,formatted-name)?format=json

This is for original image with all other data -

https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~:(id,location,picture-url,specialties,public-profile-url,email-address,formatted-name)?format=json

Just use picture-urls::(original)instead of picture-url !

This is currently being used in Gradbee

When you login to linkedin, you will get accesstoken. Use that access token and you can retrieve users data

 LinkedInApiClient client = factory.createLinkedInApiClient(accessToken);
    					com.google.code.linkedinapi.schema.Person person = client.getProfileForCurrentUser(EnumSet.of(
    							ProfileField.ID, ProfileField.FIRST_NAME, ProfileField.LAST_NAME, ProfileField.HEADLINE,
    							ProfileField.INDUSTRY, ProfileField.PICTURE_URL, ProfileField.DATE_OF_BIRTH,
    							ProfileField.LOCATION_NAME, ProfileField.MAIN_ADDRESS, ProfileField.LOCATION_COUNTRY));
    String imgageUrl=person.getPictureUrl();

If your goal is simply to display the photo on your site then the LinkedIn Member Profile Plugin may work out for you. It will display the photo, some additional info, along with LinkedIn branding.

Since the LinkedIn API is designed to be used only on behalf of the current logged in user it does not offer similar functionality as the facebook graph api.

This is my solution and it works very very well:

def callback(self):
    self.validate_oauth2callback()
    oauth_session = self.service.get_auth_session(
        data={'code': request.args['code'],
              'grant_type': 'authorization_code',
              'redirect_uri': self.get_callback_url()},
        decoder=jsondecoder
    )
    me = oauth_session.get('people/~:(id,first-name,last-name,public-profile-url,email-address,picture-url,picture-urls::(original))?format=json&oauth2_access_token='+str(oauth_session.access_token), data={'x-li-format': 'json'}, bearer_auth=False).json()
    social_id = me['id']
    name = me['firstName']
    surname = me['lastName']
    email = me['emailAddress']
    url = me['publicProfileUrl']
    image_small = me.get('pictureUrl', None)
    image_large = me.get('pictureUrls', {}).get('values', [])[0]
    return social_id, name, surname, email, url, image_small, image_large, me

For me this works

image= auth.extra.raw_info.pictureUrls.values.last.first

with omniauth-linkedin gem

This may not be quite what you're asking for, but it's useful for individual investigations.

Call up the page in Firefox, left-click the menu over the background image. Select Inspect Element(Q).

search for -target-image" That will be the end of of id attribute in an img element. The src attribute of that img element, will be the URL of the background image.