Scraper for prnt.sc

Introduction

The website LightShot or prnt.sc is a public image sharing website which is most well known for its quick and easy downloadable sharing utility activated by pressing the PrtScn key. It's a very useful tool, however I noticed that it stores images based on a sequential 6 digit code, meaning the 1.3 billion or so images uploaded there can be indexed programmatically quite easily. That is what this utility does.

Pre-requisites

This script was tested on the following python modules, however earlier/later versions may work fine:

- python 3.8
- requests
- beautifulsoup4
- lxml

Using the Script

The script takes 3 arguments as follows:

--start_code: 6 character string made up of lowercase letters and numbers which is where the scraper will start.
- e.g. lj9me9
--count: The number of images to scrape.
- e.g. 200
--output_path: The path where images will be stored.
- e.g. output/

Uses/Explanation

It can be very interesting to see what people upload to these sites, generally having sequential IDs of any type is bad, and the same applies here. People might not be aware that what they are uploading is visible to others, however prnt.sc/lightshot have not shown any inclination in wanting to change their site design.

As a result, this provides a useful way to create datasets of real world images. A useful/interesting use case is building a machine learning algorithm to classify images into categories, which requires some manual classification, but is nonetheless interesting and a good learning task.

Licensing