How do I scrape images with Scrapy?

Scraping images with Scrapy involves configuring Scrapy to download images and then creating a Spider to extract image URLs. Here are the steps to do it:

Step 1: Configure Scrapy to Download Images

In your Scrapy project, you need to configure the settings to download images. Add the following to your settings.py file:

ITEM_PIPELINES = {'scrapy.pipelines.images.ImagesPipeline': 1}

IMAGES_STORE = 'path/to/your/images/folder'

In the ITEM_PIPELINES dictionary, the key is a string which represents the path to the pipeline and the value is an integer which determines the order in which the pipelines are executed. The ImagesPipeline is a built-in pipeline for image processing in Scrapy.

The IMAGES_STORE setting specifies the directory where the images will be stored.

Step 2: Create a Scrapy Item

Scrapy uses items to define the data that you want to scrape. For scraping images, you need to create an item with an image URL and a field for the image's local file path.

In your items.py file, add:

import scrapy

class MyProjectItem(scrapy.Item):
    image_urls = scrapy.Field()
    images = scrapy.Field()

Step 3: Create a Scrapy Spider

Now, you can create a spider that extracts the image URLs and yields the item.

import scrapy
from my_project.items import MyProjectItem

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider):
    name = 'my_spider'
    start_urls = ['http://www.example.com']

    def parse(self, response):
        item = MyProjectItem()
        item['image_urls'] = response.css('img::attr(src)').getall()
        yield item

The start_urls attribute contains the list of URLs where the spider starts crawling from. The parse method is the default callback method that processes the downloaded responses.

Step 4: Running the Spider

To start the spider, you run the scrapy crawl command in the terminal:

scrapy crawl my_spider

Important Notes:

• The ImagesPipeline will take each url from the image_urls field (which is supposed to be a list) and download the image. After the image is downloaded, it puts the image's checksum and local file path into the images field.
• It's important to note that Scrapy doesn't rename the images when it downloads them. Instead, it uses a SHA1 hash of the image's URL for the file name. This is to avoid downloading the same image twice.
• The IMAGES_STORE and ITEM_PIPELINES settings must be set correctly for the image download to work. If the image download doesn't work, you should check these settings first.
• The image URLs must be absolute. If the URLs in the web page are relative URLs, you can use the response.urljoin() method to convert them into absolute URLs.