Avatars.io is a free API to get profile picture of any user from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Gravatar. Here it takes a username corresponding to social media sites that it supports and gives you a URL to the profile picture. And you can use that API URL in your mobile and web applications easily. The best part about this API is that it not only fetches the social media profile picture of a user but you can get that in different sizes too. It supports three sizes for fetching the profile picture including small (48px), medium (128px), and large (256px). The profile picture that it fetches is in square shape and then you can use that wherever you want to.
If you want to embed social profile avatar of users in your application then doing that manually will take a lot of time. If you try to do that manually then you will have to deal with bulky URLs. Also, you will have to write a few lines of code to further resize those pictures. But with this simple API, you can do that in just a few seconds. It creates a very short URL in which you just have to specify username and size parameters. You can use its web interface to construct the API call URL or you can do that manually as well.
Using this Free API to Get Profile Picture of any User from Instagram, Facebook Twitter:
Using this API to fetch user profile pictures from different social media platforms is very simple. There is no account or API key required to use it. Just go to the main website and then use the web interface to generate the API URL. Or, you can learn the API syntax as it is very simple.
So, go to the main website of Avatars.io and then select the social network from which you want to get the profile picture. Next, enter the username and hit the OK button. It will immediately show you the profile picture of that user. You can see the picture in different sizes. Also, you can copy the URL to use in your applications.
By default, if you don’t specify the size parameters in the URL then it will fetch the image in maximum size. To get the user profile picture in medium or small size, you will have to add a simple parameter in the end. Add “/small” or “/medium” at the end of the API URL to get the profile picture in the custom size.
Above, you can see how this avatar API works to get Instagram profile picture of any user. Not only Instagram but you can use it for fetching profile picture from Facebook, Twitter, and Gravatar as well. The API works fine but there are some client libraries as well for different programming languages which are not working at this moment. So, if you want to learn in-depth about this API then you will not be able to do it.
Final thoughts
Avatars.io is a really nice API for mobile and web application developers. You can painlessly embed social media avatar from different platforms and of any user in just few seconds. To get the profile picture of any user from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you just need a username. And I liked the fact that it allows you to get the user profile picture in custom sizes. So, if you are looking for a free avatar API or alternative to Gravatar API then try this out.
