How do I download images with an https URL in Python 3?

Question

I've tried to make a short mass-downloader script in Python to store lists of images locally.

It works perfectly fine for http image urls, however fails to download any image with an https url. The lines of code in question are:

import urllib.request
urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, filename)

For instance, https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/299398003486097412/303580387786096641/FB_IMG_1490534565948.jpg results in HTTP Error 403: Forbidden, as well as any other https image.

This leaves me with two questions:

How am I able to download such an image using Python?
Why do images even have https urls if they are basically just files?

EDIT:

Here's the stack trace:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "img_down.py", line 52, in <module>
    main()
  File "img_down.py", line 38, in main
    save_img(d, l)
  File "img_down.py", line 49, in save_img
    stream = read_img(url)
  File "img_down.py", line 42, in read_img
    with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response:
  File "D:\Users\Jan\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 223, in urlopen
    return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "D:\Users\Jan\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 532, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "D:\Users\Jan\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 642, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "D:\Users\Jan\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 570, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "D:\Users\Jan\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 504, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "D:\Users\Jan\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python36-32\lib\urllib\request.py", line 650, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Have you tried the solution on this post? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3042757/downloading-a-picture-via-urllib-and-python — jose_bacoy, Apr 18 '17 at 03:32
@anonyXmous I've tried it. It also raises a 403 HTTP error when confronted with this URL. — Jan Schultke, Apr 18 '17 at 03:39

score 15 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 12 '18 at 13:25

15

Hope this helps.

import requests
with open('FB_IMG_1490534565948.jpg', 'wb') as f:
    f.write(requests.get('https://url/to/image.jpg').content)

edited Apr 12 '18 at 13:25

xamgore

1,723
1
15
30

answered Apr 18 '17 at 03:58

jose_bacoy

12,227
1
20
38

Thiago Cardoso · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-18T04:02:18.663

May help you...

I made this script, but never finished (the final intention was make it running everyday automatically)

But to not be the kind of person who postpone the answers, here's the piece of code you're interest:

    def downloadimg(self):
        import datetime
        imgurl = self.getdailyimg();
        imgfilename = datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%Y%m%d') + '_' + imgurl.split('/')[-1]
        with open(IMGFOLDER + imgfilename, 'wb') as f:
            f.write(self.readimg(imgurl))

Hope it helps you out!

Edited

PS: using python3

Full script

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import os
IMGFOLDER = os.getcwd() + '/images/'


class BingImage(object):
    """docstring for BingImage"""
    BINGURL = 'http://www.bing.com/'
    JSONURL = 'HPImageArchive.aspx?format=js&idx=0&n=1&mkt=pt-BR'
    LASTIMG = None

    def __init__(self):
        super(BingImage, self).__init__()
        try:
            self.downloadimg()
        except:
            pass

    def getdailyimg(self):
        import json
        import urllib.request
        with urllib.request.urlopen(self.BINGURL + self.JSONURL) as response:
            rawjson = response.read().decode('utf-8')
            parsedjson = json.loads(rawjson)
            return self.BINGURL + parsedjson['images'][0]['url'][1:]

    def downloadimg(self):
        import datetime
        imgurl = self.getdailyimg();
        imgfilename = datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%Y%m%d') + '_' + imgurl.split('/')[-1]
        with open(IMGFOLDER + imgfilename, 'wb') as f:
            f.write(self.readimg(imgurl))
        self.LASTIMG = IMGFOLDER + imgfilename

    def checkfolder(self):
        d = os.path.dirname(IMGFOLDER)
        if not os.path.exists(d):
            os.makedirs(d)

    def readimg(self, url):
        import urllib.request
        with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response:
            return response.read()


def DefineBackground(src):
    import platform
    if platform.system() == 'Linux':
        MAINCMD = "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri"
        os.system(MAINCMD + ' file://' + src)


def GetRandomImg():
    """Return a random image already downloaded from the images folder"""
    import random
    f = []
    for (dirpath, dirnames, filenames) in os.walk(IMGFOLDER):
        f.extend(filenames)
        break
    return IMGFOLDER + random.choice(f)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    # get a new today's image from Bing
    img = BingImage()
    # check whether a new image was get or not
    if(img.LASTIMG):
        DefineBackground(img.LASTIMG)
    else:
        DefineBackground(GetRandomImg())
    print('Background defined')

Sure thing you didn't read the link I posted above... This is part of a class I made to download the _today_ image from Bing's site... What really should interest you is how you open a file (note the `'wb'` part to make it not only writable, but also binary mode) and save the raw content in it — Thiago Cardoso, Apr 18 '17 at 03:57

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 25 '19 at 12:12

Here is the latest answer to that question, I have used openCV to store images along with request Module Also it will handle batch operations and can be added as common code

import numpy as np
from urllib.request import urlopen
import cv2
import os
current_path = os.getcwd()
try: os.mkdir(current_path + "\\Downloaded\\")
except:pass

def downloadImage(url):
    try:
        print("Downloading %s" % (url))
        image_name = str(url).split('/')[-1]
        resp = urlopen(url)
        image = np.asarray(bytearray(resp.read()), dtype="uint8")
        image = cv2.imdecode(image, cv2.IMREAD_COLOR)
        cv2.imwrite(current_path + "\\Downloaded\\" + image_name, image)
    except Exception as error:
        print(error)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    urls = ["https://www.google.com/logos/doodles/2019/st-georges-day-2019-6234830302871552.20-2x.png"]
    for url in urls:
        downloadImage(url)

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 09 '19 at 21:14

referring to the following link here you may face “HTTP Error 403: Forbidden” error even after using the solution from @Thiago Cardoso as It is because the server does not know the request is coming from. Some websites will verify the UserAgent in order to prevent from abnormal visit. So you should provide information of your fake browser visit.

so i modified the code readimg method to be as following:-

def readimg(self, img_url):
    from urllib.request import urlopen, Request
    headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.3'}
    req = Request(url=img_url, headers=headers) 
    with urlopen(req) as response:
        return response.read()

Lucas Orso · Answer 5 · 2020-01-10T20:29:07.467

0

You need to make a userAgent. Probably this is a server security feature which blocks unknown user agents.

And if you setting a known browser user agent with, will work.

def download_img(img_url, img_name):
    request = Request(img_url, headers={'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'})
    response = urlopen(request)
    with open(img_name, "wb") as f:
       f.write(response.read())

edited Jan 10 '20 at 20:29

answered Jan 10 '20 at 18:45

Lucas Orso

106
5

How do I download images with an https URL in Python 3?

EDIT:

5 Answers5