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Image Extraction API

The Image API identifies the primary image(s) of a submitted web page and returns comprehensive information and metadata for each image.

Request

To use the Image API, perform a HTTP GET request on the following endpoint:

https://api.diffbot.com/v3/image

Provide the following arguments:

Argument	Description
token	Developer token
url	Web page URL of the image to process (URL encoded)
Optional arguments
fields	Used to specify optional fields to be returned by the Image API. See the Fields section below.
timeout	Sets a value in milliseconds to wait for the retrieval/fetch of content from the requested URL. The default timeout for the third-party response is 30 seconds (30000).
callback	Use for jsonp requests. Needed for cross-domain ajax.
proxy	Used to specify the IP address of a custom proxy that will be used to fetch the target page, instead of Diffbot's default IPs/proxies. (Ex: &proxy=168.212.226.204)
proxyAuth	Used to specify the authentication parameters that will be used with the proxy specified in the &proxy parameter. (Ex: &proxyAuth=username:password)

The fields argument

Use the fields argument to return optional fields in the JSON response. The default fields will always be returned. For nested arrays, use parentheses to retrieve specific fields, or * to return all sub-fields.

For example, to return meta (in addition to the default fields), your &fields argument would be:

&fields=meta

Response

The Image API returns data in JSON format.

Each V3 response includes a request object (which returns request-specific metadata), and an objects array, which will include the extracted information for all images on a submitted page.

Objects in the Image API's objects array will include the following fields:

Field	Description
type	Type of object (always image).
url	Direct link to image file.
title	Title or caption of the image, if available.
naturalHeight	Raw image height, in pixels.
naturalWidth	Raw image width, in pixels.
humanLanguage	Returns the (spoken/human) language of the submitted page, using two-letter ISO 639-1 nomenclature..
anchorUrl	If the image is hyperlinked, returns the destination URL.
pageUrl	URL of submitted page / page from which the image is extracted.
resolvedPageUrl	Returned if the pageUrl redirects to another URL.
xpath	XPath expression identifying the image node.
diffbotUri	Unique object ID. The diffbotUri is generated from the values of various Image fields and uniquely identifies the object. This can be used for deduplication.
Optional fields, available using fields= argument
displayHeight	Height of image as presented in the browser (and as sized via browser/CSS, if resized).
displayWidth	Width of image as presented in the browser (and as sized via browser/CSS, if resized).
links	Returns a top-level object (links) containing all hyperlinks found on the page.
meta	Comma-separated list of image-embedded metadata (e.g., EXIF, XMP, ICC Profile), if available within the image file.
querystring	Returns any key/value pairs present in the URL querystring. Items without a discrete value will be returned as true.
breadcrumb	Returns a top-level array (breadcrumb) of URLs and link text from page breadcrumbs.

Example Response

{
  "request": {
    "pageUrl": "http://www.diffbot.com/products",
    "api": "image",
    "options": [],
    "fields": "",
    "version": 3
  },
  {
  "objects": [
    {
      "title": "Diffy, climbing a mountain",
      "naturalHeight": 1158,
      "diffbotUri": "image|3|-1897071612",
      "pageUrl": "http://www.diffbot.com/products",
      "humanLanguage": "en",
      "naturalWidth": 950,
      "date": "Oct 19, 2013",
      "type": "image",
      "url": "http://www.diffbot.com/images/image_diffy_sample.png",
      "xpath": "/HTML/BODY/DIV[@class='main']/DIV[@id='primaryImage']/IMG"
    },
    {
      "title": "Diffy atop said mountain",
      "naturalHeight": 1120,
      "diffbotUri": "image|3|-1221792290",
      "pageUrl": "http://www.diffbot.com/products",
      "humanLanguage": "en",
      "naturalWidth": 920,
      "anchorUrl": "http://www.diffbot.com",
      "date": "Oct 21, 2013",
      "type": "image",
      "url": "http://www.diffbot.com/images/image_atopmountain_sample.png",
      "xpath": "/HTML/BODY/DIV[@class='main']/DIV[@id='secondaryImage']/A/IMG"
    },
  ],
}

Authentication

You can supply Diffbot with basic authentication credentials or custom HTTP headers (see below) to access intranet pages or other sites that require a login.

Basic Authentication

To access pages that require a login/password (using basic access authentication), include the username and password in your url parameter, e.g.: url=http%3A%2F%2FUSERNAME:PASSWORD@www.diffbot.com.

Custom HTTP Headers and JavaScript

See here for a full guide on using custom headers in direct API calls.

Custom headers

You can supply Diffbot APIs with custom HTTP headers that will be passed along when making requests to third-party sites. These can be used to define specific Referer, User-Agent, Cookie or any other values.

Custom headers should be sent as HTTP headers in your request to https://api.diffbot.com, and prepended with X-Forward-.

For instance, to send custom User-Agent, Referer and My-Custom-Header header values:

Desired Header	Send to api.diffbot.com
User-Agent:Diffbot	X-Forward-User-Agent:Diffbot
Referer:diffbot.com	X-Forward-Referer:diffbot.com
My-Custom-Header:CustomValue	X-Forward-My-Custom-Header:CustomValue

Custom Javascript

This functionality is currently in beta.

Using the X-Evaluate custom header (sent as X-Forward-X-Evaluate), you can inject your own Javascript code into web pages. Custom Javascript will be executed once the DOM has loaded.

Custom Javascript should be provided as a text string and contained in its own function. You must also include the special functions start() and end() to indicate the beginning and end of your custom script. Once end() fires, the updated document will be processed by your chosen extraction API.

It's recommended that your end() function be offset using setTimeout (see JavaScript Timing Events) in order to accommodate your primary function processing. Additionally, if your custom Javascript requires access to Ajax-delivered content, it may be necessary to offset your entire function using setTimeout in order to delay the start of your processing.

The following sample X-Evaluate header waits one-half second after the DOM has loaded, enacts a click on the a.loadMore element, then waits 800 milliseconds before signaling the end():

function() {
    start();
    setTimeout(function() {
        var loadMoreNode = document.querySelector('a.loadMore');
        if (loadMoreNode != null) {
            loadMoreNode.click();
            setTimeout(function() {
                end();
            }, 800);
        } else {
            end();
        }
    }, 500);
}

Delivered as a string value as a custom header:

"X-Forward-X-Evaluate": "function() {start();setTimeout(function(){var loadMoreNode=document.querySelector('a.loadMore');if (loadMoreNode != null) {loadMoreNode.click();setTimeout(function(){end();}, 800);} else {end();}},500);}"

Note: X-Evaluate will only be executed if called from the API the rule resides in. If you have an X-Evaluate script in your Article API rule and make a request with the Analyze API that identifies the page as an article, the X-Evaluate will not be executed.

Posting Content

If your content is not publicly available (e.g., behind a firewall), you can POST markup directly to the Image API endpoint for analysis:

https://api.diffbot.com/v3/image?token=...&url=...

Please note that the url argument is still required, and will be used to resolve any relative links contained in the markup.

Provide the content to analyze as your POST body, and specify the Content-Type header as text/html.

HTML Post Sample

curl -H "Content-Type: text/html" -d '<html><body><h2>Diffy the Robot</h2><div><img src="diffy-b.png"></div></body></html>' 'https://api.diffbot.com/v3/image?token=...&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.diffbot.com'