How can I force refresh a profile picture from social media sites?

Profile picture from social media sites (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc.) are automatically refreshed after a certain caching period. When the caching period has passed, Cloudinary checks whether the profile picture has changed and refetches it if it was.

In order to force refresh a social media profile picture you can use the explicit API (https://cloudinary.com/documentation/social_media_profile_pictures#refreshing_profile_pictures). This will refresh the image in your Cloudinary account, however this will not invalidate the image through the CDN. On the other hand, the explicit call returns the version parameter.

We recommend to include the version component as part of the URL in order to bypass CDN cached versions and to force the delivery of the newest image. The url parameter is also returned (by the explicit API) which already includes the version component with the updated value.

Alternatively, you can delete the image from your Cloudinary account, while setting the invalidate parameter to true in order to invalidate the image through the CDN. Note that it might take up to an hour for the invalidation to fully propagate through the CDN, while the version component affects immediately.

UPDATE

The explicit API now supports invalidations too (by setting the invalidate parameter to true).