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Semalt: How To Extract Images From Websites

Also known as web scraping, web content extraction is the ultimate solution to extracting images, text, and documents from websites in usable formats. Static and dynamic websites display content to the end-users as read-only, making it difficult to download content from such sites.

When it comes to online and content marketing, data is an essential tool. To make consistent and valid business, you need comprehensive data sources that display information in structured formats. This is where content scraping comes in.

Why online image crawlers?

In the modern content marketing industry, website owners' use robots.txt files to direct web scrapers of the website's sections to scrape and where to avoid. However, most of the web scrapers go against websites copyrights and policies by extracting content from "complete disallow" sites.

Recently, LinkedIn platform recently filed a lawsuit against web extractors who took the initiative of extracting vast sets of data from the LinkedIn website without checking the website's robots.txt configuration file. As a webmaster, using web scraping tools to obtain information from some sites can jeopardize your web scraping campaign.

An online image crawler is widely used by bloggers and marketers to retrieve bulk images from both dynamic and e-commerce websites. Scraped images can be viewed directly as thumbnails or saved to a local file for advanced processing. Note that CouchDB database is recommended for large-scale and advanced image scraping projects.

Online image crawlers features

An online image crawler collects vast amounts of images from websites and processes the scraped images to structured formats by generating XML and HTML reports. An online image crawler comprises of the following pre-packed features:

  • Full support of drag and drop feature that allows you to save single images on your local file
  • Logging of scraped images by generating both XML and HTML reports
  • Extracting both single and multiple images at the same time
  • Explicit observance of HTML Meta description tags and robots.txt configuration files

Getleft

Getleft is an online image crawler and a web scraper used to extract images and texts from websites. To scrape web pages using Getleft, enter URL of the website to be scraped and identify the target web pages containing images. This scraper changes the original web pages and links for local browsing.

Scraper

Scraper is a Google Chrome extension that automatically generates XPaths for determining the URLs to be crawled and scraped. Scraper is recommended for large-scale web scraping projects.

Scrapinghub

Scrapinghub is a high-quality image scraper that converts web pages into structured and well-organized content. This image scraper comprises of a proxy rotator that supports bypassing bot counter-measures to crawl bot-protected sites. Scraping hub is widely used by web scrapers to download bulk images through simple HTTP Application Programming Interface (API).

Dexi.io

Dexi.io is a browser-based image scraper that provides web proxy servers for your scraped images. This image scraper allows you to extract images from websites in form of CSV and JSON files.

Nowadays, you don't need thousands of interns to manually copy-paste images from websites. An online image crawler is an ultimate solution to extracting vast amounts of images from dynamic web pages. Use the above-highlighted online image crawlers to obtain huge amounts of images in usable formats.