How to download images programmatically from Wikimedia Commons without registering for a Bot account?

image wikipedia-api mediawiki-api pywikibot wikimedia-commons
tomvon picture tomvon · Sep 23, 2009 · Viewed 11.1k times · Source

It seems like the only way to get approval for a Bot account is if it adds to or edits information already on Wikimedia. If you try to download any images, without a bot account, using some of the api libraries out there you get error messages instead of the images. Seems like they block anyone not coming in from a browser? Anyone else have any experience with this? Am I missing something here?

Answer

Phil Hannent picture Phil Hannent · Jun 3, 2011

Having just done this myself I feel I should share:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Allimages

This API document does state that you can query the images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allimages&aiprop=url&format=xml&ailimit=10&aifrom=Albert

with the aiprop=url you are given the url of the image you are looking for.

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