How to download image using requests

Question

I'm trying to download and save an image from the web using python's requests module.

Here is the (working) code I used:

img = urllib2.urlopen(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data)) with open(path, 'w') as f:     f.write(img.read()) 

Here is the new (non-working) code using requests:

r = requests.get(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data)) if r.status_code == 200:     img = r.raw.read()     with open(path, 'w') as f:         f.write(img) 

Can you help me on what attribute from the response to use from requests?

Answer 1

You can either use the response.raw file object, or iterate over the response.

To use the response.raw file-like object will not, by default, decode compressed responses (with GZIP or deflate). You can force it to decompress for you anyway by setting the decode_content attribute to True (requests sets it to False to control decoding itself). You can then use shutil.copyfileobj() to have Python stream the data to a file object:

import requests import shutil  r = requests.get(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data), stream=True) if r.status_code == 200:     with open(path, 'wb') as f:         r.raw.decode_content = True         shutil.copyfileobj(r.raw, f)         

To iterate over the response use a loop; iterating like this ensures that data is decompressed by this stage:

r = requests.get(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data), stream=True) if r.status_code == 200:     with open(path, 'wb') as f:         for chunk in r:             f.write(chunk) 

This'll read the data in 128 byte chunks; if you feel another chunk size works better, use the Response.iter_content() method with a custom chunk size:

r = requests.get(settings.STATICMAP_URL.format(**data), stream=True) if r.status_code == 200:     with open(path, 'wb') as f:         for chunk in r.iter_content(1024):             f.write(chunk) 

Note that you need to open the destination file in binary mode to ensure python doesn't try and translate newlines for you. We also set stream=True so that requests doesn't download the whole image into memory first.

Answer 2

Get a file-like object from the request and copy it to a file. This will also avoid reading the whole thing into memory at once.

import shutil  import requests  url = 'http://example.com/img.png' response = requests.get(url, stream=True) with open('img.png', 'wb') as out_file:     shutil.copyfileobj(response.raw, out_file) del response