Web Scraping provides anyone with access to massive amounts of data from any website. As a result, some websites might hide their content and data behind login screens. This practice actually stops most web scrapers as they cannot log in to access the data the user has requested. However, there is a way to simply get past a login screen and scrape data while using a free web scraper.
Thousands of new images are uploaded to Reddit every day.
- Web Scraping I'm trying to scrape customer reviews from G2 as part of a project for my job but getting 403 error, any idea on how to go about this, I'm quite new to web scraping. Much appreciated!
- In this web scraping tutorial, we want to use Selenium to navigate to Reddit’s homepage, use the search box to perform a search for a term, and scrape the headings of the results. Reddit utilizes JavaScript for dynamically rendering content, so it’s a good way of demonstrating how to perform web scraping for advanced websites.
- Feb 19, 2020 To get started, open the Google Sheet and make a copy in your Google Drive. Go to Tools - Script editor to open the Google Script that will fetch all the data from the specified subreddit. Go to line 55 and change technology to the name of the subreddit that you wish to scrape. While you are in the script editor, choose Run - scrapeReddit.
- Jan 05, 2019 Praw is a Python wrapper for the Reddit API, which enables us to use the Reddit API with a clean Python interface. The API can be used for webscraping, creating a bot as well as many others. This article covered authentication, getting posts from a subreddit and getting comments.
Downloading every single image from your favorite subreddit could take hours of copy-pasting links and downloading files one by one.
A web scraper can easily help you scrape and download all images on a subreddit of your choice.
Web Scraping Images
To achieve our goal, we will use ParseHub, a free and powerful web scraper that can work with any website.
We will also use the free Tab Save Chrome browser extension. Make sure to get both tools set up before starting.
If you’re looking to scrape images from a different website, check out our guide on downloading images from any website.
Scraping Images from Reddit
Now, let’s get scraping.
- Open ParseHub and click on “New Project”. Enter the URL of the subreddit you will be scraping. The page will now be rendered inside the app. Make sure to use the old.reddit.com URL of the page for easier scraping.
NOTE: If you’re looking to scrape a private subreddit, check our guide on how to get past a login screen when web scraping. In this case, we will scrape images from the r/photographs subreddit.
- You can now make the first selection of your scraping job. Start by clicking on the title of the first post on the page. It will be highlighted in green to indicate that it has been selected. The rest of the posts will be highlighted in yellow.
- Click on the second post on the list to select them all. They will all now be highlighted in green. On the left sidebar, rename your selection to posts.
- ParseHub is now scraping information about each post on the page, including the thread link and title. In this case, we do not want this information. We only want direct links to the images. As a result, we will delete these extractions from our project. Do this by deleting both extract commands under your posts selection.
- Now, we will instruct ParseHub to click on each post and grab the URL of the image from each post. Start by clicking on the PLUS(+) sign next to your posts selection and choose the click command.
- A pop-up will appear asking you if this a “next page” button. Click on “no” and rename your new template to posts_template.
- Reddit will now open the first post on the list and let you select data to extract. In our case, our first post is a stickied post without an image. So we will open a new browser tab with a post that actually has an image in it.
- Now we will click on the image on the page in order to scrape its URL. This will create a new selection, rename it to image. Expand it using the icon next to its name and delete the “image” extraction, leaving only the “image_url” extraction.
Adding Pagination
ParseHub is now extracting the image URLs from each post on the first page of the subreddit. We will now make ParseHub scrape additional pages of posts.
- Using the tabs at the top and the side of ParseHub return to the subreddit page and your main_template.
- Click on the PLUS(+) sign next to your page selection and choose the“select: command.
- Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click on the “next” link. Rename your selection to “next”.
- Expand your next selection and remove both extractions under it.
- Use the PLUS(+) sign next to your next selection and add a “click” command.
- A pop-up will appear asking you if this a “next page” link. Click on Yes and enter the number of times you’d like to repeat this process. In this case, we will scrape 4 more pages.
Running your Scrape
It is now time to run your scrape and download the list of image URLs from each post.
Start by clicking on the green Get Data button on the left sidebar.
Here you will be able to test, run, or schedule your web scraping project. In this case, we will run it right away.
Once your scrape is done, you will be able to download it as a CSV or JSON file.
Downloading Images from Reddit
Now it’s time to use your extracted list of URL to download all the images you’ve selected.
For this, we will use the Tab Save Chrome browser extension. Once you’ve added it to your browser, open it and use the edit button to enter the URLs you want to download (copy-paste them from your ParseHub export).
Once you click on the download button, all images will be downloaded to your device. This might take a few minutes depending on how many images you’re downloading.
Closing Thoughts
You now know how to download images from Reddit directly to your device.
If you want to scrape more data, check out our guide on how to scrape more data from Reddit, including users, upvotes, links, comments and more.
Web Scraping provides anyone with access to massive amounts of data from any website.
As a result, some websites might hide their content and data behind login screens. This practice actually stops most web scrapers as they cannot log in to access the data the user has requested.
However, there is a way to simply get past a login screen and scrape data while using a free web scraper.
Web Scraping Past Login Screens
ParseHub is a free and powerful web scraper that can log in to any site before it starts scraping data.
You can then set it up to extract the specific data you want and download it all to an Excel or JSON file.
To get started, make sure youdownload and install ParseHub for free.
Before We Start
Before we get scraping, we recommend consulting the terms and conditions of the website you will be scraping. After all, they might be hiding their data behind a login for a reason.
For reference, we recommend you read our guide on the legality of web scraping.
Next, if you’re scraping a website where account creation is free, we recommend that you create a dummy account for your scraping purposes.
Web Scrape Reddit Free
To do this, feel free to use a new email account from a free email provider. For most cases, we recommend creating a dummy Gmail account.
Scraping a Website with a Login Screen
Web Scrape Reddit Youtube
Every login page is different, but for this example, we will setup ParseHub to login past the Reddit login screen. You might be interested in scraping data from a private Subreddit.
Web Scraper Reddit 2020
- Open ParseHub and enter the URL of the site you’d like to scrape. ParseHub will now render the page inside the app.
Web Scrape Reddit Python
- Start by clicking in the “Log In” button to select it. In the left sidebar, rename your selection to login.
- Click on the PLUS(+) sign next to your login selection and choose the Click command.
- A pop-up will appear asking you if this is “Next Page” button. Click on “No”, name your template to login_page and click “Create New Template”.
- A new browser tab and new scraping template will open in ParseHub.
- Start, by clicking on the username field. ParseHub will automatically ask you for the text to enter in this field, enter your account username and rename the selection to username.
- Click on the PLUS(+) sign next to your page selection and use the Select command.
- Now, select the password field and just like in step 6, enter your password details and rename your selection to password.
- Click on the PLUS(+) sign next to your page selection and choose the Select command.
- With the select command, click on the blue “Sign In” button and rename your selection to sign_in.
- Click on the PLUS(+) sign next to your sign_in selection and choose the Click command.
- A pop-up will appear asking you if this is a “Next Page” button. Click on “No” and create a new template. In this case, we will name it homepage.
Closing Thoughts
You now know how to easily get past any login screen while web scraping.
You can now go ahead and create the rest of your scraping project (more on this below).
Although we know that not every website is built the same, if you run into any issues while setting up this project, reach out to us via email or chat and we’ll be happy to assist you with your project.
While you’re at it, want to learn how to scrape data from Reddit? Read our guide on how to scrape Reddit posts and data.
Looking to scrape another website? Here’s how to scrape websites into Excel spreadsheets.
Or better yet, why not become a certified web scraping expert? Check out our FREE Web Scraping Certification courses and get certified today!
Happy Scraping!