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.