I've been importing photos with the picture-urls::(original)
field for years but since 2018/2/26 about half of profiles have not been returning this field and since 2018/3/1 none of them have been returning it. The picture-url
field is not a usable substitute since the photos are too small.
The field is still documented as part of the basic profile. Several others are having this problem too:
The development of the v2 of the API is at a very advanced state and eventually v1 will lose all support in a more or less organized manner.
Use v2 with a projection to get the urn to the source image
pictureInfo(cropInfo,croppedImage,hidden,masterImage)
And from then get the image. I doubt a fix will come for something that is going to get deprecated.