Image Scraper Test

Image scraper test

The following blog post was written over a year ago. The app discussed, Pin’d, has since been completed, published, and removed from the Google Play Store. I have decided not to modify the post, because it still contains lots of useful information. I also open sourced this image scraper since the original post.

I’m excited, I just got my image scrapper up and running for my Pinterest Android app, Pin’d. I wrote it as a separate project, and the coding was a couple fast hours yesterday at the coffee shop, and then an hour debugging this morning. It works well enough to dump it into my Pin’d project, and then I will simply chop it up and make it a bit more robust and stable. Currently, it only builds images based off of a full path, and also only for images that are within an img tag. I will probably keep the tag requirement, but I might be able to do something about using relative paths (really, it’s written in, I just need to test it). Oh, and if you’re really confused about what I’m talking about because I started this blog post mid-way through my stream of consciousness, I should probably give a bit more context. Basically, the experience for sharing content from the web in my Pin’d app will be the default ‘Share’ action from your normal web browser. Go to a web page you want to share, click Menu -> Share and select Pin’d from the list. Depending on what Pinterest’s API offers, I might do the same for allowing uploads from the Gallery or simply snapping a photo with the camera directly (this, too is already written). Anyways, once you click select Pin’d as your share action, it will take you to my app which will scrape the images off of the website and allow you to select one that you’d like to share. Select the image and it will build the request and send the information to Pinterest. See below the fold for a couple of images.