Image Scraping - Upscale Your Content Easily

Image scraping makes it possible to collect images and monitor your brand reputation. Find out more about its uses and importance in this article.

04:06 23 March 2023

Web scraping is a great process to collect vast amounts of information from web pages, search engines, and more. However, scraping isn’t limited to text-based data. Image scraping tools enable users to collect images across the internet. Tools like a Google Image Search API are great for ensuring your brand reputation is intact and also for collecting images to use in your content. Keep reading to learn how tools like this are very useful to ensure your visual assets aren’t being used unlawfully and automate image collection.

What Is Image Scraping?

Image scraping is similar to web scraping in that it’s an automated process for collecting images across the web. While the process is very useful for collecting images to use in your content, there are other uses of image scraping, such as monitoring your brand reputation. 

Any content creator knows the value of images. In a recent study, 50.5% of marketers noted that images were very important for their strategies while 13.1% stated that their content would be nothing without visual content. A good content creator also understands how to use images correctly to convey your message. Having appropriate images in your content makes it easier for readers to understand and it engages your audience better. Including color visuals in your content improves the readers’ willingness to read by 80%.

However, creating visual content can be time-consuming and often expensive. Paying a freelancer or in-house graphic designer to create original images isn’t always an option. In these cases, it helps to have a tool that automates the image collection process so that you can focus on other parts of your visual content creation process.

Image scraping can be used for two important business processes: monitoring brand reputation and automating image collection.

Monitor Brand Reputation

Using an image scraper, like Google Image Search API, enables businesses to search for any instances that their branded or original images have been used. The scraping tool can collect this information very fast, which means businesses can act faster when dealing with copyright or unauthorized use of their images.

In some cases, businesses may find their images, such as logos or other branding, used by another website pretending to be the original business. This happens more than we care to think, and can have a negative impact on your reputation. It’s much easier to start a business if you can piggyback off another’s success or reputation. Sometimes this occurs because people genuinely don’t understand that they can’t just use another person’s visual content without authorization. In other situations, this can also be part of a larger scheme, such as a fake website used to spread spam and other viruses. 

Automate Image Collection

The image collection process can be very time-consuming. The internet is full of images, which makes finding the right types to match your content a long, dragged-out process. In 2021, 17.8% of marketers spent more than 20 hours producing visual content. Not only that, but 31.8% of them also noted that their biggest challenge was creating visual data consistently. Automating the image collection process, that leaves marketers with more time to use the image to create original visual content. 

How Images Upscale Your Content

Images have a major effect on the engagement levels of your content. This is true whether it’s a blog post, social media, or even live videos. Some of the benefits of including high-quality visual content include:

• Images bring life to your website, making it more attractive to visitors.
• Images improve your chances of ranking better in search engines as optimized images have many SEO benefits.
• Having a successful social media presence relies on images.
• Content with images tends to get more views and keep readers engaged.

The Process of Image Scraping

Experts recommend that an image should be used once every 150-350 words. Considering that content usually ranks better when it’s above 1000 words, that means about three to four images per 1000-word article for best results. Search for those images can take a long time as you need to ensure they match your content, style, and branding. 

Using an image scraping tool, like Google Image Search API,makes it much easier to collect the images. All you do is add your specifications along with the URLs for the image libraries to be searched. The tool will then collect any relevant images and compile them in a single format.

Stock Photos

These are high-quality images, but they have limited usage rights and you’ll need to pay licensing fees. This means that when you select and purchase an image, you’ll have to state how it’s going to be used. Then, you can only use it in that way. 

Royalty-Free Images

Royalty Free images are much easier to use as they don’t have the same limitations. Once you purchase the rights to an image, you can use it in any way. Typically, royalty-free images are also more affordable than stock photos.

Public Domain Photos

Public domain photos don’t require any copyright linking, as these images are considered no-attribution visuals. These are the best to use if you don’t have a large marketing budget to spend on stock or royalty-free images.

Final Thoughts

Image scraping is not only a reliable way to collect images automatically for use in your content, but it also enables you to monitor your brand reputation. These two benefits may not seem like much, but when it comes to creating compelling and engaging content, the right visuals are key.