Suckerbug: A python script to scrape photos from facebook's public pages

Published by Krunal Kshirsagar

09 October 2021

P.S. The recent facebook outage grabbed my attention hence I wrote the script for fun ;p

Install the required libraries by entering the commands in the command terminal given below:

pip install facebook-scraper
pip install Pillow
pip install requests

facebook-scraper is a great library with which you can do much more than just scrapping photos from facebook.
Pillow is a python imaging library.
Requests is an HTTP request library used to process URLs.

Importing packages

from facebook_scraper import *
import os
import io
import requests
from PIL import Image
import tempfile

Now I wanted to make a function that will process the HTTP request, iterate through the page contents and return images that will be stored in the temporary folder(in my case I’ve saved it in the current directory).

Download image function

def download_image(img_url, out_dir, img_name):
    buffer = tempfile.SpooledTemporaryFile(max_size=1e9)
    r = requests.get(img_url, stream=True)
    if r.status_code == 200:
        downloaded = 0
        filesize = int(r.headers['content-length'])
        for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=1024):
            downloaded += len(chunk)
            buffer.write(chunk)
            print(downloaded/filesize)
        buffer.seek(0)
        i = Image.open(io.BytesIO(buffer.read()))
        i.save(os.path.join(out_dir, img_name), quality=85)
    buffer.close()

Calling the inbuilt get_photos() function from facebook-scraper library

count = 0

for img in get_photos('name of the public page without spaces', pages=1000):
    img_name = "".join(['image', str(count), '.jpg'])
    download_image(img['images'][0], "", img_name)
    count += 1

Done.

Please find the script on Github.

Thanks for reading.