How to Build a Twitter Bot with Python to Tweet Curated Images

Twitter bots have become increasingly popular in recent years as a way to automate tweeting and engage with users on the platform. A well-designed Twitter bot can provide a valuable service by sharing relevant information, curating content, and even interacting with followers.

In this tutorial, we‘ll walk through how to create a Twitter bot using Python that tweets images on a specific topic or theme at regular intervals. Whether you want to showcase stunning photography, share informative infographics, or just brighten people‘s timelines with cute animal pictures, this guide will show you how to build a bot that sources and tweets images automatically.

Here‘s an overview of what we‘ll cover:

1. Setting up your Twitter developer account and app
2. Installing the necessary Python libraries
3. Finding and downloading relevant images
4. Composing tweets with images and posting them to Twitter
5. Scheduling the bot to tweet at set times
6. Deploying the bot script to a cloud hosting service

By the end of this tutorial, you‘ll have a fully functional Twitter bot that curates and shares images around the clock. Let‘s get started!

Step 1: Creating a Twitter Developer Account and App

The first step is to set up a developer account on the Twitter Developer Platform. This will give you access to the APIs needed for your bot to interact with Twitter.

Go to developer.twitter.com and click "Apply". You‘ll need to sign in with your Twitter account, or create one if you don‘t have one already.

Fill out the application form with details about what you intend to build. For a basic image-tweeting bot, you can select "Making a bot" under the use cases section. Provide a brief description of your bot, agree to the terms and conditions, and submit your application.

Once approved, go to the developer dashboard and create a new app for your bot. Give it a name, description, and website URL (you can use a placeholder if you don‘t have one yet).

After creating the app, go to the "Keys and tokens" tab to access your API key, API secret key, Access token, and Access token secret. You‘ll need these to authenticate your bot with the Twitter API in your Python code. Keep them secret and never share them publicly.

Step 2: Setting Up Your Python Environment

Next, let‘s set up the Python environment for the Twitter bot. We‘ll be using the Tweepy library to interact with the Twitter API.

If you don‘t have Python installed already, download and install the latest version from python.org. Then open your terminal or command prompt and install Tweepy by running:

pip install tweepy

We‘ll also be using the requests library to download images and the schedule library to make the bot tweet at regular intervals. Install them with:

pip install requests schedule

With the necessary libraries installed, create a new Python file for your bot script. You can name it something like twitter_image_bot.py

Step 3: Authenticating with the Twitter API

In your bot script, add the following code to import the libraries and authenticate with the Twitter API using your access tokens:

import tweepy
import requests
import schedule
import time

consumer_key = "YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY"
consumer_secret = "YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET"  
access_token = "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"
access_token_secret = "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET"

auth = tweepy.OAuth1UserHandler(
   consumer_key, consumer_secret, access_token, access_token_secret
)

api = tweepy.API(auth)

Make sure to replace the placeholders with your actual API keys and access tokens from the developer dashboard.

Step 4: Finding and Downloading Images

There are many ways you can source images for your Twitter bot to share. A few options:

• Use an image search API like Unsplash or Pexels
• Scrape relevant images from websites using libraries like BeautifulSoup
• Pull images from a curated folder on your computer or cloud storage
• Generate your own images or infographics programmatically

For this example, let‘s use the Unsplash API to find images based on a search keyword. You‘ll need to create an account and register an app to get an access token.

Add this code to your script to search Unsplash for an image and download it:

def get_image(keyword):
  print(f"Getting an image for {keyword}...")
  url = f"https://api.unsplash.com/photos/random?query={keyword}&orientation=landscape&client_id=YOUR_UNSPLASH_ACCESS_TOKEN"
  response = requests.get(url)

  if response.status_code == 200:
    data = response.json()
    image_url = data[‘urls‘][‘small‘]  
    image_data = requests.get(image_url).content

    with open(‘image.jpg‘, ‘wb‘) as file:
      file.write(image_data)
    print("Image downloaded successfully.")
  else:
    print(f"Failed to retrieve image. Status code: {response.status_code}")

This function makes a request to the Unsplash API to get a random photo matching the given keyword. It then downloads the image and saves it as "image.jpg" in the same directory as the script. Make sure to replace YOUR_UNSPLASH_ACCESS_TOKEN with your actual token.

Step 5: Posting Tweets with Images

Now that we have a way to acquire relevant images, let‘s compose a tweet with the image and post it using Tweepy. Add the following function to your script:

def tweet_image(keyword):
  get_image(keyword)

  try:
    tweet = f"Check out this {keyword} photo!"
    api.update_status_with_media(tweet, "image.jpg")
    print("Tweet posted successfully!")
  except Exception as e:
    print(f"Error posting tweet: {e}")

This function first calls get_image() to download an image for the specified keyword. It then uses Tweepy‘s update_status_with_media() method to post a tweet with the downloaded image and a caption referencing the keyword.

Step 6: Scheduling the Bot

To make your Twitter bot tweet on a schedule, we‘ll use the schedule library. Add this code to set your bot to tweet every few hours:

schedule.every(4).hours.do(tweet_image, keyword="nature")

while True:
  schedule.run_pending()
  time.sleep(1)

This schedules tweet_image() to run every 4 hours with the keyword "nature". The while loop continuously checks for scheduled tasks to run.

Feel free to adjust the schedule and use different keywords for each tweet. You can also add multiple schedule calls for more varied content.

Step 7: Deploying Your Bot

The final step is to deploy your Twitter bot so it can run 24/7 in the cloud. There are many hosting platforms you can use, such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Heroku.

For a simple and free option, let‘s deploy our bot on PythonAnywhere. Create an account and log in.

Under "Files" create a new directory for your bot and upload your script file. Then under "Tasks", create a new "Scheduled task". Enter a descriptive name for the task (like "twitter-image-bot") and set the scheduled task to run like:

python path/to/your/script.py

Set the frequency to "Daily" and the time to every few hours, like "0:00, 4:00, 8:00, 12:00, 16:00, 20:00". This will run your bot script every 4 hours each day.

Finally, click "Create" to schedule the task and your bot will begin tweeting on the set schedule!

Responsible Bot Development

When creating any automated Twitter bot, it‘s important to follow Twitter‘s rules for bots. A few key guidelines:

• Don‘t @mention or DM users who haven‘t requested it
• Don‘t post identical or substantially similar tweets
• Don‘t simultaneously post identical or substantially similar content across multiple accounts
• Don‘t post multiple updates to a trending topic to artificially inflate its popularity

Additionally, aim to have your bot provide genuine value to your followers and the wider Twitter community. Focus on tweeting high-quality, relevant content with appropriate hashtags and attributions. Your image bot can be a great way to showcase amazing photography and artwork to your followers while crediting the original creators.

Taking Your Twitter Bot Further

This tutorial covered the basics of building a Twitter bot that curates and tweets images, but there are many ways you can enhance and customize your bot:

• Use sentiment analysis to choose images that match the mood and tone of your Twitter feed
• Allow users to tweet at your bot to request images on specific topics
• Automatically retweet and like relevant content from other accounts
• Cross-post your curated images to other social media platforms via their APIs
• Engage in trending hashtags and topics by searching for and tweeting related images

With some creativity and coding skills, you can create a Twitter bot that provides real value to both your own social media presence and to your followers. Happy botting!