Facebook Data Scraping - Download Photo from your Facebook profile.

Why I created this

I forked this repository from stevenvo's profile. I wanted to download all the photos from my facebook profile. I modified the script to make it work with python 3. I also changed the way the script parsed the data coming from facebook, because facebook changed the way its html responses looked like

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
python 3

Usage

Clone the repository to your machine

$ git clone https://github.com/LeDevDuDimanche/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 or yours, 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.