Media Scraper

media-scraper scrapes all photos and videos in a web page. It supports general-purpose scraping as well as SNS-specific scraping.

media-scraper utilizes the web driver to simulate a user browsing web pages. With the web driver, sessions and cookies easily can be handled easily but it works slightly slowly. On the other hand, I'm currently working on the migration of another repository, which crawls media only by HTTP requests, to this repository. See here.

General-purpose Scraping

The general media scraper scrapes and downloads all photos and videos in all links <a/>, images <img/> and videos <video/> of a web page.

SNS-specific

Currently there are Instagram scraper and Twitter scraper, which crawl all posts of a given user and download media in a proper way for each SNS.

Updates

Current, media-scraper is merged to contain two methods of scraping: by request and by browser.

Usage

python3 m-scraper.py rq instagram [USERNAME1 USERNAME2 ...] [-e] [-s SAVE_PATH] [-c CRED_FILE]
python3 m-scraper.py rq tumblr [SITE1 SITE2 ...] [-e] [-s SAVE_PATH] [-c CRED_FILE]
python3 m-scraper.py rq reddit [SUBREDDIT1 SUBREDDIT2 ...] [-e] [-s SAVE_PATH] [-c CRED_FILE]
python3 m-scraper.py rq pixiv [USERID1 USERID2 ...] [-e] [-s SAVE_PATH] [-c CRED_FILE]
python3 m-scraper.py rq tiktok [USERID1 USERID2 ...] [-e] [-s SAVE_PATH] [-c CRED_FILE]

If you'd like to download with your own credentials, i.e. logging in your account, please put your username and password in credentials.json and run m-scraper.py with -c credentials.json.

mv ./credentials.json.example ./credentials.json
vim ./credentials.json

Note that pixiv requires a user login to view all illustrations and mangas. If you scrape pixiv without logging in, you'll get only some of them.

For scraping TikTok videos, you'll need to get the user id first. Go to the user page in your TikTok App, share it via link, paste it in a browser, and you'll see the user id in the url bar. E.g. user id of TikTok is 107955. However, m-scraper here fetch video list via TikTok shared content, it contains most of the videos but not all of them. I'll dig into the mobile App API in the future.

Installation

Clone the media-scraper git repository.

git clone https://github.com/elvisyjlin/media-scraper.git
cd media-scraper

Install Python 3 (at least 3.5) and get all dependencies.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Web Driver

media-scraper loads the content of a web page by web driver (PhantomJS). The needed web driver will be downloaded automatically when it is used.

If you meet permission error, for example,

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: 'phantomjs' executable may have wrong permissions.

Please set the web driver to 777 for convenience.

chmod 777 webdriver/phantomjsdriver_2.1.1_win32/phantomjs.exe
chmod 777 webdriver/phantomjsdriver_2.1.1_mac64/phantomjs
chmod 777 webdriver/phantomjsdriver_2.1.1_linux64/phantomjs

To Scrape

python3 -m mediascraper.general [WEB PAGE 1] [WEB PAGE 2] ...

The media will be stored in the folder download/general.

python3 -m mediascraper.instagram [USER NAME 1] [USER NAME 2] ...

The media will be stored in the folder download/instagram.

python3 -m mediascraper.twitter [USER NAME 1] [USER NAME 2] ...

The media will be stored in the folder download/twitter.

For example, to scrape Twitter

python3 -m mediascraper.twitter Twitter

Login with Credentials

If you want to scrape a user's media with your account, just rename credentials.json.example to credentials.json and fill in your username and password.

To Import

It is easy to import media-scraper into your scripts and make use of it. Please refer to the example code for more details.

Media Scraper

python3 -m mediascraper.general [URL1 URL2 ...]
python3 -m mediascraper.instagram [USERNAME1 USERNAME2 ...]
python3 -m mediascraper.twitter [USERNAME1 USERNAME2 ...]

Parameters of Scraper

Parameter	Description	Default Value
scroll_pause	the pause interval when scrolling	0.5 (seconds)
mode	'silent', normal' or 'verbose'	'normal'
debug	prints debugging messages if True	False

Connect Methods of Scraper

Scraper	Methods
MediaScraper	connect(URL)
InstagramScraper	username(USERNAME)
TwitterScraper	username(USERNAME)

Note

Instagram

Instagram changed API 3 times this year (2018), so the query API in media-scraper is out-of-date. Please see instagramer.py, which works well for downloading all media form Instagram. The instruction is here.

Twitter [Solved]

For some reasons, Twitter utilizes blob url for videos, which is not supported by media-scraper currently. I'm still working on this problem.

06/07/2018 Update: It supports downloading videos in Twitter now!