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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Redacted Font

    Back when I created client websites, one of the many things that frustrated me was the initial design handoff.  It would always go like this: Work hard to incorporate client's ideas, dream up awesome design. Create said design, using Lorem Ipsum text Send initial design concept to the client...

  • By
    HTML5 download Attribute

    I tend to get caught up on the JavaScript side of the HTML5 revolution, and can you blame me?  HTML5 gives us awesome "big" stuff like WebSockets, Web Workers, History, Storage and little helpers like the Element classList collection.  There are, however, smaller features in...

Discussion

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