Alright, let’s talk about my little image-scraping adventure: “images of ivanka.” Sounds simple, right? Well, it was… kinda.
First things first, I needed to figure out where I was gonna grab the images from. I didn’t want to be a jerk and overload some random website, so I started with a basic Google Images search, just to see what was out there. I figured I’d focus on publicly available stuff, nothing behind paywalls or anything like that.
Next, the code. I used Python – my go-to for quick projects like this. I installed `requests` for handling the HTTP requests and `Beautiful Soup` for parsing the HTML. Seriously, Beautiful Soup is a lifesaver when you’re dealing with messy web pages.
The initial code was super basic:
- Send a GET request to the Google Images page.
- Parse the HTML with Beautiful Soup.
- Find all the `img` tags.
- Extract the `src` attribute (where the image URLs are hiding).
Easy peasy, right? Nope. Google is sneaky. The `src` attributes don’t always point directly to the images. Sometimes they’re encoded or point to a thumbnail. So, I had to dig deeper.
I noticed that the actual image URLs were often hidden within the `data-src` attribute. Bingo! I tweaked my code to prioritize `data-src` over `src`. Much better.
Then came the download part. I used `requests` again to download each image, giving them a simple name like “ivanka_*,” “ivanka_*,” and so on.
Here’s where things got a little messy. Some of the URLs were broken, some were duplicates, and some were just… not images. I added some error handling to skip the broken links and a simple check to avoid downloading the same image multiple times.
I also ran into issues with rate limiting. Google doesn’t like it when you hammer their servers with requests. I added a `*()` call to pause for a second between each download. It slowed things down, but it kept me from getting blocked.
After a few hours of tweaking and running, I had a folder full of Ivanka images. Some were good, some were bad, but hey, it worked!
The final step? Cleaning up. I manually went through the images and deleted the ones that weren’t relevant or were just low-quality. It was a bit tedious, but worth it.
So, yeah, that’s my “images of ivanka” story. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was a fun little project that taught me a few things about web scraping and the importance of error handling.
Would I do it again? Probably. But next time, I’d be a little more careful about the ethical implications of scraping images of people. Just something to think about.
