Web scraping refers to the process where a software extracts contents from a web source and then converts them into a more organized set of data. This technique is used mainly for downloading important information from a website. It can also be used to track changes in a website, to monitor product prices, or to scrape images from web page.
Why You Need to Scrape Images
There are a number of reasons to scrape images from web page including the need to compile a set of images that come from a single source. For example, an online magazine commonly releases new covers every month. If you need to compile all the covers that magazine has released from the very first cover, web scraping is a great option.
Another example is when you need to collect all the pictures of a certain artist’s public artworks. The classic method of right-clicking the picture and selecting “save as” may do the work. But such method can consume a large portion of your time especially when you need to save upwards of a hundred images. It will definitely be a time-saver if you scrape images from web page instead of saving each of them manually.
Image Scraping Tools
There are many downloadable software and online programs that offer image scraping feature. It is often included as a part of the program’s main web scraping service. You may use any of the programs listed below to scrape images from web page and transfer them in your desired destination.
Apify
Apify is a cloud-based web scraping service provider that works on any web browser. Aside from its advanced options to scrape data from large websites, it also offers different options to scrape images from web page.
The crawler (a bot that fetches and extracts data) of Apify can automatically obtain the links of the images present in a web page. All of the links obtained are added to the queue of pages from which you want to extract images. From the queue, you may select the images you want to save and transfer them into a specific destination.
You can seek further assistance for this image scraping option from Apify’s website. There is a collection of video clips that demonstrate how to scrape images from web page using the software.
Cyotek WebCopy
Cyotek WebCopy features full content extraction from a single website. It also provides a partial website extraction option in case you only need some of the website’s content. You may also use the software to download videos, extract text resources, and scrape images from web page.
Cyotek WebCopy’s crawler examines all the linked resources in a page’s HTML mark-up to determine the links of all objects included in the page such as images. Through this, it can generate a copy of the website which can be viewed offline.
ScrapeBox
ScrapeBox is a web-scraping software that comes with a Google Images Harvester. It has multi-threaded connections which means it can locate images from several different websites aside from google images.
Once ScrapeBox is installed, the user can start to scrape images from web page by putting in keywords to the search tab. You can filter the search results by the size of the images you want to locate. You can download all or some of the images and transfer them to a folder in your computer.
ScrapeBox also has an option that lets you save and export the URLs as you scrape images from web page. This is a good option when you do not want to download a set of images but you want to save them for later viewing.
If you want to scrape images from web page by batch, ScrapeBox has a feature called Bulk Image Downloader. It can download images directly from the source websites without the need to check the availability of such images in Google Images.
Furthermore, ScrapeBox comes with a proxy support to prevent banning issues when you scrape images from web page that blocks crawlers.
WebHarvy
WebHarvy is a non-programmer’s tool that accommodates beginners in web scraping. Its point-and-click system allows users to easily scrape information such as URLs and e-mails from a website. It can also scrape images from web page and extract text data from a given source.
WebHarvy has a built-in scheduler that enables automatic crawling. In addition to that, it provides proxy support that allows users to scrape images from web page without getting blocked by the web source.
The current version of WebHarvy has a wide range of options to which you can convert and export the images you have extracted from a website.
Scrapy
Scrapy is an open source framework used for extensive data extraction. The program features a fast and simple way to crawl websites. All you need is to create and run your own web crawlers (or web spiders) to scrape images from web page.
Scrapy can get contents from image tags through a simple script. The links of image resources that your crawlers get are automatically transferred to your desired destination. It can also scrape images from multiple pages. This software, however, can only be appropriately used if the user understands basic programming.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a cloud-based web scraping tool that does not directly scrape images from web page. However, it has a convenient feature that helps user to scrape images from web page more easily than other web scraping programs.
Octoparse has a built-in browser where you can open a target website. There you can extract the URLs of all the images in the website. The extracted URLs will then be listed in a single field and you can export the list to a certain destination (a database or an excel file).
To scrape images from web page, you need an extension in your browser that enables the browser to download multiple resources using URLs. An example of which is the Tab Save. It is a chrome extension that downloads images using only the resource links.
Simply copy the exported list of URLs and paste it in the textbox. The images will be downloaded once you click the download button.
Scrape Images Responsibly
Images are one of the most easy-to-steal materials in the Internet. This is the reason a lot of web pages register their self-produced images under legal protection. So, even if you are using the best web scraping tool, always consider the source’s rules and rights before you scrape images from web page.
