How to scrape images from a website using Python?

Lewis Kerr - Aug 24 - - Dev Community

To scrape images from a website using Python, you'll typically use several popular libraries, such as requests for making network requests,BeautifulSoup for parsing HTML, and Pillow (an updated version of PIL) for processing images.

Steps for Python to scrap images from the website

Here are a simple step-by-step guide showing how to scrape images from a website:

1. Install the necessary libraries

If you have not installed these libraries yet, you can install them through pip:
pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pillow

2. Send a request and get the webpage content

Use the requests library to send an HTTP request and get the HTML content of the webpage.

3. Parse HTML and find the image link

Use BeautifulSoup to parse the webpage content and find the URL of the image.

4. Download the image

Use the requests library again to download the image content according to the URL of the image, and use the Pillow library to save the image locally.
Here is a simple example code:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from PIL import Image
from io import BytesIO

# URL of the target page
url = 'https://example.com'

# Send a request and get the web page content
response = requests.get(url)
html = response.text

# Parsing HTML
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, 'html.parser')

# Find all image tags
images = soup.find_all('img')

# Traverse the image tags and download the images
for img in images:
    src = img['src']  # Get the URL of the image
    response = requests.get(src)
    img_data = response.content

    # Using PIL to process image data
    image = Image.open(BytesIO(img_data))

    # Save the image locally
    image.save(f'downloaded_{img["src"].split("/")[-1]}')

print('Image download complete!')
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Please note that this sample code may need to be adjusted depending on the specifics of the website you are crawling. For example, some websites may have images loaded dynamically via JavaScript, in which case you may need to use a tool like Selenium to simulate browser behavior. ‌

How to avoid IP blocking or scraping restrictions?

To avoid IP blocking or crawling restrictions, you can adopt the following strategies:

1.Use proxy

Choose high-quality proxy servers and dynamically rotate IP addresses to reduce the probability of being blocked. At the same time, using highly anonymous proxies can better hide the real IP address and reduce the risk of being detected.

2.Control crawling frequency and request volume

Slow down the crawling speed, reduce the pressure on the target website, and avoid sending a large number of requests in a short period of time. Set the number of concurrent crawlers reasonably to avoid server overload caused by excessive concurrent requests.

3.Simulate real user behavior

Disguise User-Agent, randomize crawling mode, and simulate the TCP or TLS fingerprint of real users to reduce the risk of being identified as a crawler.

4.Comply with website rules and laws and regulations

Check the robots.txt file, comply with API usage rules, and do not engage in illegal or copyright-infringing behavior.

Also, before scraping a website, make sure you comply with the site's robots.txt file and that your actions comply with relevant laws and regulations. ‌

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