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We have written an application that posts text and images to Facebook. The application works almost as intended, but there remains a major problem. This problem seems to be specific to the use of Fan Page albums. We have created a FB account that has 2 Fan Pages, each with 3 user albums. However, several of the albums have the flag can_upload set to false.

So the first set of questions is how does this flag get set? And why would it be set to false for user albums? Can it be reset by the user or some other way?

In our 6 Fan Page albums (2 Fan Pages, 3 albums each) 1 album has the flag set "correctly", that is can_upload=true. For this album we can upload images and text as expected. 5 of the albums have can_upload set to false. However, we can upload images and text to 3 of these albums as well (i do not understand why this is). 2 of the albums do not allow us to upload images (this makes sense, given that the can_upload is set to false, or so it seems to me).

So the second question is what does this flag actually do? Is it only sometimes used? Is there a bug in Facebook that causes it to work sporadically?

If the can_upload flag worked as expected, we could simply filter out the Fan Page albums that have it set to false. But if we do that, at least for our test FB account, we are throwing away perfectly good postable albums.

The error message we get from FB when trying to post to the 2 Fan Page albums that do NOT allow it is: "Application does not have the capability to make this API call".

Any insight into what might be happening here would be greatly appreciated!

Christian Doppler
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  • Noticed some strangeness along the same lines with some of our app's user's fan page albums. can_upload set to false sometimes means we cannot upload; other times it we can upload anyway. Doesn't appear to be set to true for any of the albums for the account I speak of. – mellodev Oct 12 '12 at 23:35

2 Answers2

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I've been having a great deal of photo upload problems recently, so I've been doing a lot of research on this as well.

It appears the can_upload bit value is being set properly, but there are some albums which are not available for accepting uploads. The four I've found are Wall Photos (friends wall), Wall Photos, Cover Photos, and Profile photos. These all show can_upload: false.

https://graph.facebook.com/@profileid/albums?access_token=@yourtoken

When the photo uploads fail, we see the image getting an image id, but the post not getting a message id. The photo is actually uploaded and available via direct url, but is not associated to any albums:

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=@photoid

Try filtering these albums (based on can_upload) from the list of available albums for the user to select from during the upload process.

Are you still seeing errors? Are the albums you were unable to upload to the profile/coverphotos/wall photos?

Hopefully this helps someone else running into facebook photo upload errors

mellodev
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there is definitely some problem in the facebook graph api as with the page access token i was able to upload pictures to it even though it showed that can_upload photos was set to false for all the fabpage albums.(with same access token)

palash kulshreshtha
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  • confirmed: got the same situation with 'Timeline Photos' album - API shows `can_upload = false` but POST to /{album-id}/photos posted an image – Arij Oct 06 '17 at 09:32