Semalt Expert Elaborates On Scraping Google Images

Searching images on Google is the most popular way to get wallpapers for your desktop, images for the project, pictures for inspiration and so on. But sometimes it takes too much time to look through all of them and download each image manually, so you need to speed up and ease the process. Of course, automating the process of downloading Google images can be a piece of cake if you have special software like Google Image Downloader or any other, but most of them are not free. We're going to show you some comfortable ways of scraping Google images with scripts.

PHP Script

PHP is a pretty useful programming language for creating a web scraper. With a simple PHP script, you can scrape images on any theme you need from Google. You can set request and depth of scrape. All the images will be downloaded to whatever folder you need in no time.

There are plenty of already existing PHP scripts out there for this purpose. If you're not familiar with programming and can't create it on your own, surf the Internet and find the one you're most comfortable with.

Python Script

Another simple solution to scraping Google images is using Python script. You can find different ready to use scripts on GitHub or write it yourself. Python is masterful at doing its job, and there are lots of libraries that will help you create your own web scraper.

Most scraping scripts on Python use urllib and urllib2. This module has its own functions and classes that help in working with URLs - basic and digest authentication, redirects, cookies and much more. Usually, scripts with urllib also use BeautifulSoup library which is basically the most popular tool for scraping anything and Google images is not an exception.

But note that there is a lot of info you can't get with urllib. That's when you can try Selenium, a package automating web browser interaction with Python. The using of Selenium always comes to the creation of a bot that performs all manual work with the browser in an automated manner. And that's exactly what we need.

Other Options

There are actually a lot of ways to scrape Google images, so the options shown in this article are just examples. Programming language or software you choose to write a script is only a matter of taste. It's possible to scrape images from Google with a lot more different Python libraries than listed here (Scrapy, JSON, etc.), you can also do it with Java or JavaScript. Be creative and find your own way!

Conclusion

So, as you can see, scraping Google images is not so hard with Python or PHP scripts. Now it won't be any problem for you to download tons of images from Google in just a few minutes.

You're free to use any of the scripts from GitHub but remember, some images are under copyright law, and you can't publicly or commercially use them without permission from the owner.