Facebook Data Scraping - Download Photo from your friend's Facebook profile

Why I created this

This is a side project that was quickly developed while I'm working on my Face Recognition project. The Face Recognition project requires a lot of face images for the training and testing purposes. And I was too lazy to save each image from Facebook to my computer so I created this tool to help me with the automatic crawling.

Since it's a quick project (~2 hours development time), there might be inevitable bugs or issues. And because Facebook UI always keep changing so my code might stop working at some point. If you found a bug, or fixed one, please feel free to create a Pull request, and I will look into it. Much appreciate your contribution.

Prerequisites

These are the open-source libraries or framework utilized in the project, which requires installation before hand:

• Scrapy framework: a very powerful web data scraping tool and framework for Python developers. Installation using PIP: pip install scrapy
• BeautifulSoup: a great HTML text entities parsing & formatting library. Installation: pip install beautifulsoup4
• Image module: pip install image
• Twisted module: pip install twisted

Usage

Clone the repository to your machine

$ git clone https://github.com/stevenvo/facebook_data_scraping.git
$ cd facebook_data_scraping

Execute

scrapy crawl photo_crawler -a email=<email> -a password=<password> -a target_username=<profile_username>

Parameters:

• email: login email to your Facebook account.
• password: login password to your Facebook account.
• target_username: Facebook profile ID which you want to crawl all images from. Using your browser and go to your friend's profile page, the profile ID is the string after the split character '/'.
  • For example https://www.facebook.com/johnson, the ID will be johnson.

All images will be downloaded into folder downloaded-photos. The image filename will have 2 parts: 1st part contains the target_username, 2nd part is the random file name.

Notes:

• I've configured THROTTLE and USER-AGENT parameters in the settings.py. It makes the query more reasonable with less "robot" browsing speed and more legit user agent. Feel free to adjust it to your needs.
• Don't ask me about using Facebook Graph API. Facebook has removed the API access to friends data since v2.4, all you can read is your own information. So it's not much very useful here.

Disclaimer: this is an open-source project for educational purposes, please use it at your own risk, I'm not responsible for your account being banned by Facebook, nor your password is stolen.