How to scrape Google Images

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🤔 Why should you scrape Google Image Search?

Google Images is a huge repository of visual data from our modern society. Say you need to find your view of your potential new home's neighborhood or how it looked like 2 years ago. One pic from Google Images, and you're satisfied. Preparing a birthday party for your child? Search for best decorations for kids bd party and get inspired in a second.

What do these two examples mean? 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.

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.

⭐️  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:

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.

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?

✍️ 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.

🏴󠁡󠁴󠀲󠁿 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.

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.

👇 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.

🔦 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:

Try these and start scraping Google like a pro.

❓FAQs

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.

Is it possible to use Google Images Scraper in Python?

Of course! Apify APIs are designed to be used with Python. You just need to access Google Image Scraper with the apify-client PyPi package. Find more info in our docs.

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.