FawsImageSearch is an Anki add-on to batch download images from an image search engine, such as Bing,
Google Images, etc. At the moment, it supports only Bing. It's based on a rewritten version of
batch-download-pictures-from-google-images.
TODO: Add a screenshot/gif
It works with the latest version of Anki at the time of writing (2.1.54).
I wrote this add-on, because I waited for over six months for someone to write something that would work with the latest version of Anki, but sadly, nobody did. All other such add-ons:
Faws: Free and working still.
TODO: Add URL to our Anki page here.
Currently, the add-on only works with Bing Images, though more sources can easily be added (pull requests welcome).
Google doesn't want you to take pictures from Google Images using a program. For that reason, they're constantly changing the structure of their site (most guides on the internet for how to do this are outdated because it changes fairly frequently), which makes any tool that scrapes Google Images brittle and easily broken.
Bing is much more friendly in this regard, which results in a more stable tool.
Barring SerpAPI, which is paid, there is pretty much no good way to scrape Google Images and simultaneously have a robust and maintainable add-on. StackOverflow answers from one to two years ago at the time of writing are already outdated.
The batch-download-pictures-from-google-images (see the acknowledgements) add-on has code that, for example, is parsing the HTML as such:
for d in data[31][0][12][2]:
try:
results.append(d[1][3][0])
except Exception as e:
passThis is by no means meant to shade the original author -- my point is that there's no avoiding something like that based on how Google has structured their page results, so this is about the best it can get.
If the site being scraped eventually changes their format, I don't want to go spend time to find out whether the 33rd or 34th index of the array is the one that contains image data (and repeat this process multiple times throughout the page). In short, Bing has somewhat lower quality of images but a more maintainable way of accessing the images.
See this thread.
pip3 install Pillow -t vendorAfter that, move this directory to the Anki add-ons folder. This is covered in the official documentation.
Bugs can be reported either by filing an issue or contacting me at the email on my Github.
Pull requests are welcome. Feel free to first open an issue for discussion.
Big thanks goes to @kelciour, who created the batch-download-pictures-from-google-images (doesn't work in newer versions of Anki). Much of the code was modeled off of his repository.