Building a Telegram Bot - Step by Step

Sending Images

Welcome to the third part of our Telegram bot development series. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to send images 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, 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")

Replace "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN" with the actual token you received when you created your bot using BotFather on Telegram. This line of code sets up your bot and allows it to send messages and images.

Step 3: Sending an Image

To send an image, you'll use the `send_photo` method. Here's how you can send an image:

@bot.message_handler(commands=['sendimage'])
def send_image(message):
    # Open the image file in binary mode
    image = open('image.jpg', 'rb')
    # Send the photo to the chat using the send_photo method
    bot.send_photo(message.chat.id, image)

This code defines a command handler for "/sendimage". When a user sends this command to your bot, it will open the image file "image.jpg" in binary mode and then send it as a photo to the chat.

Step 4: Poll for Updates

Just like in previous parts, add the code to continuously poll for updates:

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

This part of the code ensures that your bot constantly checks for new messages and responds to commands or events in real-time.

Summary

In this part, we learned how to send images using a Telegram bot. The key steps involve importing the necessary library, initializing your bot, defining a command handler to send the image, and continuously polling for updates.

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