why couldn't I download images from google with python?

Question

The code helped me download bunch of images from google. It used to work a few days back and now all of the sudden the code breaks.

Code :

# importing google_images_download module 
from google_images_download import google_images_download  

# creating object 
response = google_images_download.googleimagesdownload()  

search_queries = ['Apple', 'Orange', 'Grapes', 'water melon'] 


def downloadimages(query): 
    # keywords is the search query 
    # format is the image file format 
    # limit is the number of images to be downloaded 
    # print urs is to print the image file url 
    # size is the image size which can 
    # be specified manually ("large, medium, icon") 
    # aspect ratio denotes the height width ratio 
    # of images to download. ("tall, square, wide, panoramic") 
    arguments = {"keywords": query, 
                 "format": "jpg", 
                 "limit":4, 
                 "print_urls":True, 
                 "size": "medium", 
                 "aspect_ratio": "panoramic"} 
    try: 
        response.download(arguments) 

    # Handling File NotFound Error     
    except FileNotFoundError:  
        arguments = {"keywords": query, 
                     "format": "jpg", 
                     "limit":4, 
                     "print_urls":True,  
                     "size": "medium"} 

        # Providing arguments for the searched query 
        try: 
            # Downloading the photos based 
            # on the given arguments 
            response.download(arguments)  
        except: 
            pass

# Driver Code 
for query in search_queries: 
    downloadimages(query)  
    print()

Output log:

Item no.: 1 --> Item name = Apple Evaluating... Starting Download...

Unfortunately all 4 could not be downloaded because some images were not downloadable. 0 is all we got for this search filter!

Errors: 0

Item no.: 1 --> Item name = Orange Evaluating... Starting Download...

Unfortunately all 4 could not be downloaded because some images were not downloadable. 0 is all we got for this search filter!

Errors: 0

Item no.: 1 --> Item name = Grapes Evaluating... Starting Download...

Unfortunately all 4 could not be downloaded because some images were not downloadable. 0 is all we got for this search filter!

Errors: 0

Item no.: 1 --> Item name = water melon Evaluating... Starting Download...

Unfortunately all 4 could not be downloaded because some images were not downloadable. 0 is all we got for this search filter!

Errors: 0

This actually create a folder but no images in it.

Answer 1

google_images_download project is no longer seems compatible wrt Google APIs.

As an alternative you can try simple_image_download .

Answer 2

It looks like there is an issue with the package. See these open PRs:PR1 andPR2

Answer 3

I think Google is changing the DOM. The element class="rg_meta notranslate" is no longer exist. It is changed to class="rg_i ..."

def get_soup(url,header):
    return BeautifulSoup(urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(url,headers=header)),'html.parser')    

def main(args):
    query = "typical face"
    query = query.split()
    query = '+'.join(query)
    url = "https://www.google.co.in/search?q="+query+"&source=lnms&tbm=isch"
    headers = {}
    headers['User-Agent'] = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36"
    soup = get_soup(url, headers)
    for a in soup.find_all("img", {"class": "rg_i"}):
        wget.download(a.attrs["data-iurl"], a.attrs["data-iid"])


if __name__ == '__main__':
    from sys import argv
    try:
        main(argv)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        pass
    sys.exit()

Answer 4

Indeed the issue has appeared not so long ago, there are already a bunch of similar Github issues:

• https://github.com/hardikvasa/google-images-download/pull/298
• https://github.com/hardikvasa/google-images-download/issues/301
• https://github.com/hardikvasa/google-images-download/issues/302

Unfortunately, there is no official solution, for now, you could use the temporary solution that was provided in the discussions.

Answer 5

The reason this doesn't work is because google changed the way they do everything so that you now need the api_key included in the search string. As a result of this packages such as google-images-download no longer work even if you use the 2.8.0 version because they have no placeholder to insert the api_key string which you must register with Google to get your 2500 free downloads per day.

If you are willing to pay $50 per month or more to access a service from serpapi.com , one way to do this is to use the pip package google-search-results and provide your api_key as part of the query params.

params = {
           "engine" : "google",
           ...
           "api_key" : "secret_api_key" 
}

where you provide your API key yourself and then call:

client = GoogleSearchResults(params)
results = client.get_dict()

This returns a JSON string with the link to all the image urls and then you just download them directly.