Web Scraping Facebook with Selenium - AUTOMATED BOT

Introduction

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create an automated web scraping bot using Python and Selenium to download an entire Facebook image gallery. This guide will walk you through the necessary preparations, installations, coding steps, and execution of the bot, ensuring you have a robust tool to collect personal and tagged photos from Facebook efficiently.

Step 1: Prepare Your Environment

Before you start coding, ensure your environment is ready for web scraping.

1. Install Python:

   • Download and install Python from the official website.
   • Verify the installation by running python --version in your command line.

2. Install Jupyter Notebook:

   • Install Jupyter by running the command:

     pip install notebook
     

   • Launch Jupyter Notebook by typing jupyter notebook in your command line.

Step 2: Install Required Libraries

You need to install the necessary libraries for web scraping.

1. Install Selenium:

   • Run the following command to install Selenium:

     pip install selenium
     

2. Install Wget (optional but useful for downloading files):

   • Download Wget from its official site and follow the installation instructions for your OS.

Step 3: Download Chrome Driver

To interact with the Chrome browser, you need the Chrome Driver.

1. Download Chrome Driver:
   • Go to the Chrome Driver downloads page.
   • Download the version that matches your installed Chrome browser version.
   • Extract the downloaded file and note the path where it is saved.

Step 4: Launch Jupyter Notebook

Open Jupyter Notebook and create a new Python notebook where you will write your web scraping code.

Step 5: Code Setup

Now you will set up the initial part of your code.

1. Import Libraries:

   from selenium import webdriver
   from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
   import time
   import os
   

2. Initialize Web Driver:

   driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='path/to/chromedriver')
   

Step 6: Navigate to Facebook

You will need to log in to Facebook to access the image galleries.

1. Open Facebook:

   driver.get("https://www.facebook.com")
   

2. Login Process:

   • Locate the username and password fields and input your credentials:

   username = driver.find_element(By.ID, "email")
   password = driver.find_element(By.ID, "pass")
   username.send_keys("your-email")
   password.send_keys("your-password")
   

3. Submit the Form:

   password.submit()
   

Step 7: Access Photo Gallery

Navigate to your photo gallery or a friend's tagged photos.

1. Dismiss Alerts: Handle any pop-ups or alerts that may appear.
2. Shortcut to Get Photo Gallery: Use the appropriate URL to access the photo gallery directly.

Step 8: Loop Through Photos

To download both tagged and personal photos, set up loops.

1. Scroll to the End of the Page:

   • Use a loop to scroll down the page until all photos are loaded:

   while True:
       driver.execute_script("window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);")
       time.sleep(2)  # Adjust the sleep time based on your internet speed
   

2. Target All Anchor Elements:

   • Collect links to image elements:

   links = driver.find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, "a")
   

Step 9: Download Images

Create a directory for saving the images and download them.

1. Create Directory:

   if not os.path.exists('Facebook Images'):
       os.makedirs('Facebook Images')
   

2. Download All Photos:

   • Iterate through the image links and download them:

   for link in links:
       img_url = link.get_attribute('href')
       os.system(f'wget {img_url} -P Facebook Images')
   

Step 10: Finalize and Run the Bot

1. Finalize Your Code: Review the entire code for completeness.
2. Run the Bot: Execute the notebook to run your bot:

   driver.quit()  # Close the browser once done
   

Conclusion

You have successfully created a web scraping bot to download Facebook images using Python and Selenium. This automated process can be adjusted for future changes made by Facebook. Keep experimenting with your code to enhance its capabilities, and consider exploring additional features or integrating this bot with other projects. Happy scraping!