GoogleImagesDownloader

This repository can download images from google with specified keywords

Requirements

• python 3.5
• selenium 3.6.0
• Firefox
• geckodriver

Firefox and geckodriver are required by selenium, and Firefox 55 or greater is recommended, cause geckodriver support that best. As for geckodriver, just download the latest version of geckodriver from here, then add it to the PATH environment variable.

Here is an example of downloading with selenium using 2 processes

Details and Configuration

Two Methods

Two different methods are provided

• download_with_urllib
• download_with_selenium

download_with_urllib is to download with just package urllib, but due to the limit by google, each searching query can download at most 100 images

download_with_selenium is to download with package selenium and urllib, with selenium, we can directly search and scroll in the browser, so we can get more than 100 images for each searching query

Both of the above methods support downloading with single process or mulitple processes, and download_with_selenium will firstly store the actual links of images in a file, then download the actual images with the file, while download_with_urllib will directly download all the images since the number if small

Specify main_keywords and supplemented_keywords in the code, each main_keyword will join with each supplemented_keyword to become a searching query, and one directory will be created for each main_keyword to store the related images.The following image is a simple example

Download With Time Limit

As to the script download_images_with_time_limit.py, it is a replacement of the method download_images in script download_with_selenium.py, because the method download_images will always block due to network issue, so I add restriction that each http request can cost at most 10 sceonds, and that is what download_images_with_time_limit.py does.

Pay attention that the time-limited strategy is to use the signal that system provides, and here the SIGALRM in unix-like system is adopted, so this script should run with unix-like system rather than Windows. However, the network blocking thing happened when I ran the script in my network, but not sure whether this will happen in yours, so you can test with download_with_selenium.py firstly, if the downloading task blocks, change to the script download_images_with_time_limit.py

More details about the repository can be obtained in this blog