Kevin deLeon Photography

How to force TwitPic to pull your Twitter profile picture

January 11th, 2009 | Category: software, tutorials

UPDATE: THIS SEEMS TO NOT BE WORKING ANYMORE.

I am a pretty avid Twitter user and I use TwitPic to post pictures to my Twitter timeline.  Recently I noticed TwitPic was not pulling my profile image from Twitter, which I had always assumed was automatic.  Apparently I was wrong. Some may say this is trivial, but hey, I like things to be consistent. So, after an hour or so of screwing around with it, and finally figuring it out, I thought I would share what I found.

First, there is no setting in “Settings” on TwitPic to upload a profile picture.  To get TwitPic to pull your profile picture from Twitter, try the following completely unintuitive process:

  1. Log into TwitPic using your Twitter username and password.
  2. Click “Upload Photo” in the navigation bar at the top of the page.
  3. Choose an image you would like to upload to TwitPic.  It doesn’t matter WHAT picture it is.  It doesn’t have to be the image you want for your profile, because TwitPic will pull whatever image you are using on your Twitter profile (which once again in my opinion should be automatic!).
  4. After completing all the fields, make sure you DO NOT check the box that reads “Check this if you only want to upload the photo and not post it to your Twitter profile.”
  5. Click “Post It”
  6. TA-DAAAA…Your TwitPic profile is now using your Twitter profile picture.

You may have to do this each time you change your Twitter profile picture.

Don’t ask me why you have to do it this way.  It doesn’t make any sense to me either.  I would hope TwitPic fixes whatever is broken behind the scenes that is preventing profiles pics from being pulled automatically.

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21 comments

21 Comments so far

  1. Shay R February 11th, 2009 7:41 pm

    Thanks!! This solved my issue :)

  2. Nichelle February 13th, 2009 10:53 am

    You are the man! Thanks!!

  3. tossy February 18th, 2009 7:08 pm

    Thanx!

  4. lisa March 1st, 2009 5:32 pm

    Thank you!!!!!!!!!! This is just what I needed.

  5. Noah Everett March 4th, 2009 9:39 am

    Great tutorial, thanks for posting it.

    This will be fixed in the next version we are working on. The reason its not automatically updated is because we have so many users that we would be hammering the Twitter API all the time to make sure the avatars/profile information is up to date. But in the next version we will have a better solution. Thanks!

  6. kdeleon March 4th, 2009 9:52 am

    Thanks for the comment Noah. Makes sense. Let me know when you guys implement the new solution, and I will post an update, and a new post stating it is fixed.

    Any idea what the solution is going to be? Static profile picture upload option?

    Thanks.

  7. Ryan March 5th, 2009 11:59 am

    I imagine it will just poll ever 12hrs or something. I know that is how most Twitter clients function. Maybe with twitpic being so big they will do once a week poll? It should atleast cache the old image somehow. Mine has been a “broken” image forever and I don’t want to post a random photo to my feed for no reason. Oh well.

    @ryanschmidt

  8. Ryan March 5th, 2009 11:59 am

    Oh, and I forgot to mention that I already used your method once and it worked perfect. Now that I have changed my photo it died again.

  9. kdeleon March 5th, 2009 12:03 pm

    @ryan,

    Yeah if you change your profile pic you have to repeat the process unfortunately…Only solution for the time being though :/

    -K

  10. Fashion photographer March 27th, 2009 4:49 am

    Hi,
    Thanks for the product.
    I am searching for long time.
    Thanks for sharing.

  11. maria April 7th, 2009 6:55 pm

    I tried it is not working that way

  12. Carrie April 26th, 2009 7:29 pm

    not working for me. :-(

  13. kdeleon April 28th, 2009 5:53 am

    Carrie,

    Sorry to hear that…They may have changed the way the program works. I know at some point the were planning on implementing a more permanent fix.

  14. sandipkumar June 10th, 2009 10:16 am

    thanks a ton. solved my issue as well..

  15. sandipkumar June 10th, 2009 10:25 am

    oops..it didn’t work

  16. leni June 17th, 2009 2:30 am

    does not work with me. weird. (and so stupid from twit-whatever)

  17. Jeannette August 29th, 2009 8:01 pm

    Im using an iphonw i tried this and is still not working for me :( any suggestions

  18. UPDATE: Getting TwitPic to pull your Twitter Profile Picture (avatar) | Kevin deLeon Photography August 30th, 2009 11:47 am

    [...] in January I posted about forcing TwitPic to pull your Twitter profile picture. It seems that this method is no longer [...]

  19. Niki January 11th, 2010 9:00 am

    This didn’t work for me when I tried. What did work was more simple: I was using a GIF as my profile pic instead of a PNG or JPG. When I went into my Twitter profile and changed the pic to a PNG file, it did two things for me: showed my profile pic on iPhone (I had lost my image when I first switched over) and changed automatically on Twitpic.

  20. admin January 19th, 2010 8:48 pm

    Niki,

    Thanks for the heads up. Yeah this solution was only meant to be a temporary solution. One of the guys from Twitpic posted earlier in the comments and said they were going to fix the problem with a more permanent solution. I would guess since this no longer works, that they have in fact put in place a more permanent fix.

  21. Julio Zendejas April 5th, 2010 10:00 am

    Thank You! I love that you’re like the main suggestion on google on how to fix this…and yeah this is definitely a pain in the but…but I’m glad there’s someone great like you to post an easy step by step solution! (^_^ )

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