How do you get a thumbnail of a movie using IMDbPy?

python imdb imdbpy
andrewrk picture andrewrk · Nov 9, 2008 · Viewed 8.4k times · Source

Using IMDbPy it is painfully easy to access movies from the IMDB site:

import imdb

access = imdb.IMDb()
movie = access.get_movie(3242) # random ID

print "title: %s year: %s" % (movie['title'], movie['year'])

However I see no way to get the picture or thumbnail of the movie cover. Suggestions?

Answer

Tim Kersten picture Tim Kersten · Nov 9, 2008

Note:

  • Not every movie has a cover url. (The random ID in your example doesn't.)
  • Make sure you're using an up-to-date version of IMDbPy. (IMDb changes, and IMDbPy with it.)

...

import imdb

access = imdb.IMDb()
movie = access.get_movie(1132626)

print "title: %s year: %s" % (movie['title'], movie['year'])
print "Cover url: %s" % movie['cover url']

If for some reason you can't use the above, you can always use something like BeautifulSoup to get the cover url.

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import imdb

access = imdb.IMDb()
movie = access.get_movie(1132626)

page = urllib2.urlopen(access.get_imdbURL(movie))
soup = BeautifulSoup(page)
cover_div = soup.find(attrs={"class" : "photo"})
cover_url = (photo_div.find('img'))['src']
print "Cover url: %s" % cover_url

Related questions

IMDB to MySQL: Insert IMDB data into MySQL database

I’m looking for a solution to import all the IMDB data into my own MySQL database. I’ve downloaded all the IMDB data files from their homepage which are all in the file format *.list (in Windows). I want …

Read More
How do I list all files of a directory?

How can I list all files of a directory in Python and add them to a list?

Read More
Iterating over dictionaries using 'for' loops

I am a bit puzzled by the following code: d = {'x': 1, 'y': 2, 'z': 3} for key in d: print key, 'corresponds to', d[key] What I don't understand is the key portion. How does Python recognize that it needs only to …

Read More