Scrape Images with wget

By  on  

The desire to download all images or video on the page has been around since the beginning of the internet.  Twenty years ago I would accomplish this task with a python script I downloaded.  I then moved on to browser extensions for this task, then started using a PhearJS Node.js JavaScript utility to scrape images.  All of these solutions are nice but I wanted to know how I could accomplish this task from command line.

To scrape images (or any specific file extensions) from command line, you can use wget:

wget -nd -H -p -A jpg,jpeg,png,gif -e robots=off http://boards.4chan.org/sp/

The script above downloads images across hosts (i.e. from a CDN or other subdomain) to the directory from which the command is run from.  You'll see downloaded media as they come down:

Reusing existing connection to s.4cdn.org:80.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1505 (1.5K) [image/jpeg]
Saving to: '1490571194319s.jpg'

1490571194319s.jpg 100%[=====================>] 1.47K --.-KB/s in 0s

2017-03-26 18:33:26 (205 MB/s) - '1490571194319s.jpg' saved [1505/1505]

FINISHED --2017-03-26 18:33:26--
Total wall clock time: 2.7s
Downloaded: 66 files, 412K in 0.2s (2.10 MB/s)

Everyone loves cURL, which is another awesome resource, but don't foget about wget, which is arguably easier to use!

Recent Features

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools 1.3 Browser Object

    MooTools 1.3 was just released and one of the big additions is the Browser object.  The Browser object is very helpful in that not only do you get information about browser type and browser versions, you can gain information about the user's OS, browser plugins, and...

  • By
    Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows

    Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them.  For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked.  Just because we...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!