Semalt: How To Extract A Background Image From A Website

One of the most attractive features of a website is its background image. Once you hit a web page, the background image is one of the first things you notice. Sometimes you may come across a website with a fantastic background image, and you may decide to scrape it.

Unfortunately, many organizations usually protect the content of their site including its background images from being scraped or downloaded. So, copying them may be difficult. Here are three major options for downloading background images of websites:

• The first option is to outsource the task of downloading background images to an experienced third-party web scraping company. However, this option is a little costlier than others.
• The second option is to hire programmers to build a custom web scraping tool for you. This will also cost you a lot of money. So, it may not be a good idea if you don't scrape background images regularly.
• The third option is to either make use of a generic tool or find a suitable technique for the task. If you want to download an image from a particular website quickly, you need to locate the path to CSS file of the web page. Then, you need to write a simple set of codes for the task. Although this option is quite effective, it has a little drawback. It requires some programming knowledge and skills.

Although scraping background images may seem to be a complex task, there is a simple solution for it. Sometimes a seemingly complex task has a very simple solution. To download protected background images from some websites, you need a Firefox browser.

How to download background images with Firefox browser?

• Open the target web page with your Firefox browser
• After that, you should right-click anywhere on the image
• From the options, select "View Page Info"
• Now, some important information about the target web page will show up in different tabs
• You should select the Media tab
• A list of all the images that are present on the background of the website will pop up. You should click the particular background image(s) you intend to scrape
• Once you click the image, its preview will appear in another window
• Click the "Save As" button, and you will be prompted to choose the location where you want scraped background image saved. It is better to save it to your local computer for multiple uses.

Conclusion

There are other web scraping tools that can handle the task, but you need to try several ones until you stumble on the one that can scrape background images effectively. One thing is sure, website owners will continue to upgrade their security features to make it difficult for any robot or software to scrape data from their site, so you also need to keep upgrading your data extraction knowledge and tools too.