How to scrape Google Images

Learn how to scrape Google Images and expand your data collection to gain valuable insights.

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Google Images presents a great source of visual data. And our society relies on visuals more and more. When you put two and two together, you discover that any business needs this data to maintain or establish its place on the market.

But the amount of data is overwhelming. How to get them all without going crazy? The answer is web scraping - a powerful method that lets you automatically extract web data, even in your sleep.

❓Can I scrape Google Images with an API?

Yes and no. Confusing? Let me explain. The good news is that you're right: using an API for scraping is a good point to start from. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are essential tools for establishing connections with the domain you want to scrape.

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New to APIs? No worries! Read the basic guide about APIs for dummies and learn more in a few minutes.

The bad news is… sadly, there is no official Google Images API anymore. Google APIs Explorer guides you through all the APIs that Google provides. Trust me, there are a lot of them. However, Google Image Search API has not been among them since 2011.

That being said, you're probably wondering what else you could use to help you scrape Google Images. You don‘t have to think twice - the clear solution is Google Images Scraper.

Scrape Google Images

⭐️  How does Google Images Scraper work?

Google Images Scraper is a ready-made web scraping tool. That means you‘ll not have to do much more programming to start getting the data. The developer has already done it for you. And the rest is a piece of cake - follow this guide and learn how to use the scraper.

Spoiler: The steps describe how to find Google Images Scraper on Apify Store, create an account, run the scraper, and download the data. That‘s all.

📊 What data can I get using Google Images Scraper?

Which data exactly will you get by scraping Google Images? There‘s a bunch of them. You're probably primarily interested in the image URL and title; however, that‘s only the minimum. You'll gain insights about the pictures' dimensions, which might help you estimate the image trends better or even get the same data for the images‘ thumbnails.

Here - all the data you‘ll get in one place:

🔍 Query 🌐 Website of origin of the image
📄 Page title 🖼️ Image URL
📏 Image width 📐 Image height
🖼️ Thumbnail URL 🌐 Page URL
📏 Thumbnail width 📐 Thumbnail height
Scraping Google Images

How to scrape Google Images in 4 steps

Let‘s get straight to the work! Scraping Google Images is easier than you think. All you need to do is to follow this 4-step guide.

1️⃣ Step 1: Find Google Images Scraper on Apify Store

Start with finding Google Images Scraper on Apify Store. Note that there are more than 1,600 web scraping tools, so you might want to use the categories filter or go directly to this Actor.

Once you're on the right page, choose the Try for free button, and you're ready to start scraping Google Images.

Scrape Google Images
Step 1: Find Google Images Scraper on Apify Store

If it‘s your first time on Apify, you‘ll need to sign up with your email, Google, or GitHub account. No need to worr2

y — you don‘t have to type in your credit card details, and the Free plan gives you a free $5 credit. With that, you can scrape around 1,600 Google Images monthly. Isn‘t that worth trying?

Google Image Search
Get started for free with $5 credit.

✍️ Step 2: Write down your search query

Now comes the question. How to make the Actor scrape what you want? Just write the keyword you want to search for in the Searches to go through line. Click on the blue plus button Add if you want to scraper more search terms. Once you run the scraper, it will crawl the web and find data for every image associated with these terms.

To clarify it even more, have a look at the example below. In this case, we want to scrape Google Images that depict forests.

Google Image Search API
Step 2: Write down your search query

🏴󠁡󠁴󠀲󠁿 Step 3: Click Start to scrape info from Google Images

The rest of the work is up to the scraper. Just hit the green Start button and let the magic happen.

Google Images Scraper
Step 3: Click Start to scrape info from Google Images

You‘ll see the status changes to Running and eventually to Succeeded. That means you have your data prepared. The images, their width, height, thumbnail URL, thumbnail width, height, content URL, and much more are ready for you in a huge table. You can also display it in JSON.

See the results before downloading them

👇 Step 4: Choose your preferred format and download Google Image data

Of course, you‘ll not be stuck with a vast amount of data in Apify Console. You can download it in a variety of formats, including HTML table, RSS, CSV, XML, and, of course, Excel.

Before hitting the Download button, you can also choose if you want to omit some fields. That‘s great in case you need, let‘s say, only the titles of the images, and you don‘t really care about their heights.

Google Images Scraping
Step 4: Choose your preferred format and download Google Image data

🔦 How to use Google Images search data?

Google Images search data might be used in various fields, the most obvious and usual ones include:

  • Competitive analysis and market research: Images are part of the competition game, so why not use this data as a competitor monitoring tool? Analyze them and what you'll get is a great help when conducting competitive analysis. Gain an insight into the visual trend of your market and become its leader.
  • E-commerce and retail: Online retailers can use the info to optimize their product listings. That helps with achieving higher conversion rates.
  • Content creation and user experience: Thanks to the scraped data, marketers can optimize their own pictures for SEO and, therefore, scale their ranking.

Scrape the whole Google world

By now, you're probably experiencing a sudden urge to scrape all of Google! Well, you can! Be assured that Google Images Scraper is not the only one in the Apify arsenal. Meet its siblings:

🗺️ Google Maps Scraper 🌐 Google Search Scraper
🏢 Google Jobs Scraper 📰 Google News Scraper
🔍 Google Search Bar Scraper 📷 Google Lens Scraper
🏫 Google Scholar Scraper 📈 Google Trend Scraper

Try these and start scraping Google like a pro.

Scraping Google Images

❓FAQs

How to do image scraping?

There are more ways how to do image scraping. You can do it with Python or easily by using Google Images Scraper or other scrapers in Apify Store. Do image scraping with Python following these steps:

1. Choose the Python libraries you’ll use. The most popular ones for web scraping include Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, or Selenium.

2. Inspect the page with images you want to scrape and define the tags where the images are nested. Usually, it’ll be img tag.

3. Write and execute the code. There are Python web scraping templates you can use for that.

How to scrape Google images?

The easiest way how to scrape Google Images is to use Google Images Scraper. How to do it? Find Google Images Scraper on Apify Store, fill in the searches you’re looking for, and the number of search results you’d like to scrape (for example, scraping 50 results of search query collies puppies). Then, hit the Save and Start button and wait for the results.

Does Google allow image scraping?

Google allows image scraping (and web scraping in general) to the extent of its Terms of Service. Having said that, it’s clear that you must ensure you don’t violate it. Moreover, as a person of integrity, make sure you learn how to do ethical web scraping as well.

Is scraping Google Images legal?

Seeing the unlimited possibilities of data storages that can be scraped, you might find yourself in doubt about the legality of web scraping. You can find more about that in this comprehensive guide to the legality of web scraping or in this video interview on whether web scraping is legal. If you don‘t want to read or hear any more words today, let me sum it up for you: yes, web scraping is legal.

Can I download images from Google with Google Images Scraper?

Yes, but you'll need a helping hand from Image Downloader. Once you get the URLs, Image Downloader will download the images from them into a ZIP folder.

Can I use Google Images scraper for reverse image search?

Unfortunately, no. Google Images Scraper cannot handle reverse image search i.e., search with pics rather than words.

No need to worry, though! You can scrape reverse image search with Google Lens Actor.

How to scrape Google images using Python?

You can scrape Google images with Python using Apify APIs. The only thing you need to do is to access Google Image Scraper with the apify-client PyPi package. Find more info in our docs.

Is it possible to scrape Google Search?

Of course, you can scrape Google Search. To do that, you’ll need to use Google Search Results Scraper. With that, you’ll get tons of data such as all organic and paid results, product ads, prices, ratings and review counts, and much more.

How can I integrate scraping Google Images into my workflow?

Thanks to predefined integrations, every scraper on the Apify platform can be connected to other services, such as Zapier, Google, or GitHub. Find out how to connect the app you need.

How can I build my own Google Images scraper?

Would you like your own Google Images Scraper? No problem! All you need is basic programming experience, an Apify Creator plan, and ready-to-use web scraping templates for Python and JavaScript.

Daniela Ryplová
Daniela Ryplová
Marketing coordinator at Apify. Passionate about disruptive innovations that can change the world for the better.

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