Table of Contents
Foreword
There are plenty of applications that work with images nowadays. If you, for instance, want to create one for whatever purposes like image refining, colorizing, or something else, you need pictures and consequently, find an image URL on a website to scrape for every picture you use. However, the task may be a challenge, because the sites like Facebook or Flickr, for instance, provide the URL to a photo that turns out to actually be a link to a whole photo album and not the file. To strip images from websites, it’s reasonable to turn to web scraping. There are several common ways to do it. Traditionally we mention such options as the tools off-the-shelf usage, the custom web-scraper creation, or turning for professional data delivery services, like DataOx.The tools that come in handy for image URLs scraping
OctoparseOctoparse is a well-known tool for data extraction. It allows at least 3
ways to scrape image URLs from a target site. You can choose the one
best matching your requirements for data format and get
- All image URLs extracted and laid out in different columns of the
same row.
- All URLs on the same webpage in one column
- All the image URLs exported in one cell by RegExp Tool.
Smart Image DownloaderSmart Image Downloader from Algorithmia. This tool supports links for
Dropbox, Imgur, Google Drive, 500px, Twitter, and much more. A single
API call allows it to parse image URLs from the pages on the web, resize
them, save the images as a .PNG, .JPG, or .BMP. and store them.
PythonA few libraries are needed to find image URLs on websites and extract
images from the sites on the web. Commonly BeautifulSoup, Selenium, and
Pandas are used for image URLs harvesting and data gathering into a .CSV
file.Then several additional libraries like Pillow and requests are needed to
store the content, convert it into an image object and save it to a
location specified.
Chrome extensionsImage Link Grabber allows images links extraction with a single click.
All you need is just open the necessary page and click on the app icon,
you’ll get the links right away.
Data Delivery servicesIt’s no doubt all the tools and approaches to strip images from websites
are good and workable for certain tasks. However, if you want to be sure
you get comprehensive datasets and the quality of the image URLs and
images themselves are good, our advice is to turn to a professional data
delivery service. Knowing all the ropes of the process, professionals
can help you save your time and effort.
