Facebook Cookbook

Album Table

Problem

What’s the schema for the album table?

Solution

The album table holds all of the photo albums that users have created in the Facebook Photos application. Its fields are listed in Table 8-2. Queries to this table will only return data the current user is allowed to see (in other words, you can’t request albums that this user isn’t allowed to see). More information about this table, including an up-to-date listing of fields, can be found at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Album_(FQL).

Table 8-2. album table fields

Name	Type	Index	Description
aid	int	•	Album ID.
cover_pid	int	•	pid (photo ID) of the photo that has been set as the cover of the album.
owner	int	•	uid (user ID) of the owner of this album (i.e., the user who created it).
name	string		Name of the album.
created	string		Creation date of the album.
modified	string		Date that the album was last updated, in epoch seconds (see Formatting Relative Time for an explanation of epoch seconds).
description	string		Description entered by the album’s owner.
location	string		Location entered by the album’s owner (e.g., Toronto, The Moon).
size	int		The number of photos in the album.
link	string		URL to the album (i.e., the actual Facebook URL for this album).

Note that only the fields marked as “Index” in this table can be used in an FQL query’s WHERE clause, but any of the fields can appear in the SELECT.

Discussion

If you’d rather use the API to access albums, try the Photos.getAlbums() method.