The site seems very locked down lol, i guess they really want me to pay $300 for semi high resolution images, so i want to scrape the previews instead. it’s probably some sort of script since with noscript on the site doesn’t even load. It’s even beaten my ‘absolute enable right click’ Extension , and while i can still get the right click going and take a screenshot, i have no option to open the image itself in a new window.
Next up was a simple scraping extension, one i use regularly is webscraper but it’s a huge process to use and can snag super easily, so i tried this one called Download All images
That one didn’t grab anything besides headers and icons and seemed to have gotten me IP banned. Thankfully i have a vpn and they didn’t even revoke my gallery access and i’m back at it again.
I have tried commercial scraping software before but the problem is, afaik these are very big on following robots.txt and that makes a lot of sites unscrapable.
So you’ve all heard my dilemma, and i’m curious, cause at this point it’s a game. How would you all approach this? what software would you use?
You didn’t even describe how it’s on the website.
I would use the webbrowser/Firefox save page functionality.
Or open the webbrowser dev tools and document.querySelectorAll('img') and get the URLs from it and use those.
Or Page info media tab.
Or dev tools network tab. To identify and use the image web requests.
Or use Nushell with query module enabled, and http get query html.
Or my own C# until.
But I suspect there’s Auth in play, so the only easy access is within the browser session?
I’d probably use selenium. But that depends.
Puppeteer and playwright were not mentioned yet
Before scraping I would verify that there is no HTTP API that you can use to craft requests instead of scraping from the website. These might be higher quality than what you can scrape. If there is no easy to use http API, go to scraping then. I would generally consider scraping the last option, unless it’s a ridiculously easy website to scrape.
Have a look at RobotFramework with the Selenium library. Anything you can manage manually, you can automate repetitively with Robot.
Also, have a look at the F12 Network tab, in case the real images are stored in a predictably named manner.
