PiPlanter 2 | Solving Broken Pipe Errors [Errno 32] in Tweepy

If I haven’t mentioned it already, https://twitter.com/piplanter_bot IS the new twitter account for PiPlanter. Like last time, I’m using the tweepy library for python to handle all things twitter for the project. What I’m NOT using this time is Flickr. From a design point of view, it wasn’t worth it. It was too complicated and had too many things that could go wrong for me to continue using it. Twitter is more than capable of hosting images, and tweepy has a very simple method of passing these images to twitter. Recently I moved the whole setup indoors and mounted it all onto a shelf seen here and it came with a set of strange problems.

Long story short, what I think happened was that since I moved them to a different location, the complexity of the images increased, causing an increase in the size of the images themselves. A broken pipe error implies that the entirety of the package sent to twitter wasn’t sent, causing the tweet not to go through. I first started to suspect this problem after seeing this:

 

The graphs were going through just fine, but images were seeming to have a hard time. You can’t tell from this photo, but those tweets are hours apart as opposed to the 20 minutes they are supposed to be. Once I started having this problem, I bit the bullet and integrated logging into my project which produced this log:

Hours and hours of failed tweets due to “[Errno 32] Broken pipe”. I tried a lot of things, I figured out that it was the size of the images after seeing this:

Photos that were simple in nature had no problem being sent. After scaling the image size down, I’ve had absolutely no problem sending tweets.


If you are tweeting images with tweepy in python and getting intermediate Broken pipe errors, decrease the size of your image.
Thanks for reading.

Hey! This post was written a long time ago, but I'm leaving it up on the off-chance it may help someone. Proceed with caution. It may not be a good idea to blindly integrate this code or work into your project, but instead use it as a starting point.

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