Saving Image from URL using Node.js

I have been creating a scraper and need an automation to download some images. I spend hours to finally get it right. So, here I am writing this post, hoping that it would help someone in needs (or even future me finds this from search engine).

There may be a lot of other way, but here's the one that works for me today.

const fs = require('fs');
const fetch = require('node-fetch');

const url = "https://www.something.com/.../image.jpg"

async function download() {
  const response = await fetch(url);
  const buffer = await response.buffer();
  fs.writeFile(`./image.jpg`, buffer, () => 
    console.log('finished downloading!'));
}

Please note that fs is included in the node framework, while node-fetch may need to be installed first.

You can combine this with any scraper library like puppeteer.

Comments

[Justin Rascoe]

Straight forward. Just what I was looking for. Thank you!

[Stefan Musarra]

With Node version 18, there is a native fetch method. However, the response object returned does not have a .buffer method. If you use the native fetch, this minor modification is required:

async function download(url, outputFile) {
    const response = await fetch(url);
    const arrayBuffer = await response.arrayBuffer();
    const buffer = Buffer.from(arrayBuffer, 'binary');
    fs.writeFileSync('image.jpg', buffer);
}

[TalOrlanczyk]

really important due to request been deprecated and still been download a lot

[LordDarthViadro]

Exactly what i needed, thanks.

[Sristi Chowdhury]

I want to simply create a read stream and pass on the image to another api.Is that possible here ? Working with multer gives no help on Heroku.