In this blog post, we will explore how to download images and videos using the requests-html library in Python. requests-html is a powerful library that allows us to scrape and interact with websites by making HTTP requests.

Installation

Before we start, make sure you have requests-html installed. You can install it using pip:

pip install requests-html

Downloading Images

To download an image from a website, we first need to make an HTTP request to retrieve the image file. Then, we can save the contents of the response to a file.

Let’s assume we have the URL of an image that we want to download:

from requests_html import HTMLSession

url = "https://example.com/image.jpg"

To download the image, we can use the following code:

session = HTMLSession()

response = session.get(url)

image_content = response.content

with open("image.jpg", "wb") as f:
    f.write(image_content)

In this example, we create an HTMLSession object and make a GET request to the image URL. We then retrieve the content of the response and save it to a file named “image.jpg” using a binary write mode ("wb"). Now, the image is downloaded and saved to our local directory.

Downloading Videos

Downloading videos using requests-html follows a similar process. We make a GET request to the video URL and save the response to a file. However, there is an additional step involved to ensure that we handle video streaming correctly.

from requests_html import HTMLSession

url = "https://example.com/video.mp4"

To download the video, we can use the following code:

session = HTMLSession()

response = session.get(url, stream=True)

with open("video.mp4", "wb") as f:
    for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=8192):
        f.write(chunk)

In this example, we set stream=True in our GET request to handle video streaming. We then iterate over the response content in chunks and write them to a file named “video.mp4” using a binary write mode ("wb"). This ensures that the video is downloaded and saved correctly.

Conclusion

Using the requests-html library in Python, we can easily download images and videos from websites. By making HTTP requests and handling the response content, we can save these multimedia files to our local directories. This allows us to automate the process of downloading images and videos, making it easier to gather and work with media content.