Building a Telegram Bot - Step by Step

Receiving Images

Welcome to the fourth part of our Telegram bot development series. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to receive images from users and process them using your Telegram bot.

Step 1: Import the Required Libraries

Start by importing the necessary libraries in your Python code:

import telebot

Here, we import the "telebot" library as before, which allows us to interact with the Telegram Bot API.

Step 2: Initialize Your Bot

Initialize your bot using the bot token you obtained from BotFather:

bot = telebot.TeleBot("YOUR_BOT_TOKEN")

Just like in previous parts, replace "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN" with the actual token you received when you created your bot using BotFather. This line of code sets up your bot.

Step 3: Receiving Images

To receive images from users, we'll use the `message_handler` decorator to handle incoming messages. Here's how you can do it:

@bot.message_handler(content_types=['photo'])
def handle_image(message):
    # Get the file ID of the largest available photo
    file_id = message.photo[-1].file_id
    # Download the image using the file ID
    image_info = bot.get_file(file_id)
    image_url = f"https://api.telegram.org/file/botYOUR_BOT_TOKEN/{image_info.file_path}"
    # Process the image or save it as needed
    # Example: Save the image with a unique name
    with open(f"received_image_{file_id}.jpg", 'wb') as image_file:
        image_file.write(requests.get(image_url).content)
    # Reply to the user
    bot.reply_to(message, "Thank you for the image!")

This code defines a message handler that listens for messages with content type "photo." When a user sends an image to your bot, it extracts the file ID of the largest available photo, downloads the image, and processes it as needed. In this example, we save the image with a unique name and reply to the user with a thank-you message.

Step 4: Poll for Updates

Add the code to continuously poll for updates as usual:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    bot.polling(none_stop=True)

This part ensures that your bot keeps checking for new messages and responds to incoming images in real-time.

Summary

In this part, we learned how to receive images from users and process them using a Telegram bot. You can adapt this code to save or analyze received images as per your bot's requirements.

Stay tuned for the next part of our series where we'll explore more Telegram bot capabilities!