Recently
I needed to write code that would allow me to harvest images from a site where the images were displayed 10 per page over n number of pages. I wanted to set it up so that I could start it and let it run over time and harvest images. This immediately meant I’d be working with PHP and jQuery using AJAX. I’ve written another post titled Web Scraping Using PHP and jQuery about this type of AJAX script and I needed to use what I’d learned here to implement this new scraping engine.
The reason I’m writing this code is so that we can start a few studies on selfies.
I ended up using a bookmarklet, which is a JavaScript snippet that you can add to a browser as a bookmark. We had assistants visit the pages where the images were stored and click on the bookmark to harvest images and metadata associated with each image. While it is a bit cumbersome, it was the easiest and quickest way to start collecting the images for our project. I wrote the code such that the JavaScript would speak to the PHP code and the PHP code would handle all the heavy lifting (saving image and scraping page for metadata). The images and text files were automatically saved to a Dropbox folder using the Dropbox API.