DEV Community: doldoki

Downloading Image Files from Websites

doldoki — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 04:42:00 +0000

One of my clients asked me whether there's an easier way to download image files from a website. That is, easier than right clicking the photo and 'save image as' route. I won't share the details but they wanted to crawl an ecommerce website and get the product image files.

I did a few web scraping projects before but I never had to download image files before so I looked into available options.

I found two that looked simple. One was using the Requests library and the other was this thing called Wget https://pypi.org/project/wget/, and I opted for Wget.

Here is the basic setup for downloading an image file from the web.

import wget
url ='http://image_url.jpg'
filename = wget.download(url)

That's it. Use the Requests library and Beautiful Soup to get a list of urls for image files and loop them over and download the files using Wget! Oh make sure you check the website owner's policy on web scraping.

.webp to .jpg for Product Image

doldoki — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 01:17:03 +0000

Recently a friend of mine asked me to help him with converting .webp image files to .jpg. Apparently you can't upload .webp files on Shopify. Converting one or two files can be done easily using free services available online, but bulk conversion was a different story. That's right - You need to pay up!

So I did a quick research and found out that I can use the Pillow library https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/# for image file conversion.

Let's look at the bare minimum.


from PIL import Image

im = Image.open('image_file.webp')
im.save('image_file.jpg')

This code will take in an image file and spit out an image file of your choice.

As mentioned above, I need to a bulk conversion.
Let's bring in the os module to work with files and path.

from PIL import Image
import os

cwd = os.getcwd()
file_path = os.path.join(cwd, 'imgs')
output_path = os.path.join(cwd,'output')
file_list = os.listdir(file_path)

for file in file_list:

    im = Image.open(os.path.join(file_path, file))
    file_name = file.split('.')[0]
    im.save(f'{output_path}\\{file_name}.jpg')
    print(f'{file_name} Done!')

I made 'imgs' folder where I have the original image files for conversion(.webp). Then I created 'output' folder for storing my output(.jpg).

Then I got a list of my input files using the os.listdir() and looped over the list to save each file into .jpg.

Quick and easy!

Add color to your code block

doldoki — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 04:10:12 +0000

So you started a blog on dev.to but when you wrote your code in a code block, you noticed this.

let str = 'Hello World';
console.log(str);

Fortunately, dev.to offers an easy way to add colors to your codes for better display and readability.

let str = 'Hello World';
console.log(str);

Simply add the name of your programming language right after the first three back-ticks(or the opening back-ticks) for your code block.

I tried Python, Javascript, and PHP. They all worked fine.