Looking to find a set of images, their source, or do a reverse image search? Then this is the guide for you.
Since the Google Image API has been discontinued, companies and developers have found it difficult to get the image data they need for their projects.
In this guide, we’re going to walk you through the best Google Image Search APIs and proxy solutions that offer you the ability to access Google’s Image Search for your projects.
We’ve reviewed a wide range of options, from the fully featured and expensive Google Images APIs, to the more barebones but extremely affordable proxy solutions that allow you to build your own customized Google Image API at a fraction of the cost.
To help you make an informed decision, this guide reviews the best options for Google Image APIs, paid proxies and free proxies that can help you find and filter images to meet everyone’s image search requirements and budget.
Well, let’s get to it!
1. ScraperAPI
To kick off our list is the ScraperAPI, and we’ll tell you why. Simply put, ScraperAPI is a proxy API designed to handle browsers, proxies, and CAPTCHAs, so you can get the web data you need with a simple API call.
ScraperAPI is one of the best proxy solutions for developers who need to scrape Google, Amazon, and other highly popular but difficult sites to scrape. With great reliability, global geotargeting capabilities, and flexible pricing ScraperAPI is the best choice for anyone looking to scrape Google Images at scale.
It also enables you to extract data from rich media applications and sites and returning the extracted data in HTML, JPEG, or plain text formats.
Not only can you use the Google API to scrape images, but it also allows you to scrape PDFs or other files just as you would do with any different URL.
With its automatic IP and header and rotation built-in as standard, ScraperAPI makes your web scraping less frustrating and unbelievably simple! Overall, this is a great option for you to harness the power of scraping images from the Google search API at an affordable price.
Price: You can get started by signing up for 1000 free API credits without a credit card. Their subscription plans are some of the cheapest in the market, starting at $29 for 250,000 API credits.
Pros: Compared to other Google image recognition API tools, ScraperAPI is easy to use, offers excellent functionality, and is fully customizable with incredibly cheap plans, including a free plan.
Cons: Requires that you have basic web scraping skills.
2. SERP API
The next option on our list is SERP API, a great option for those who just want Google Image data and don’t want to have to build their own web scrapers for images.
The guys at SERP API have done a great job building an API specifically for Google Image Search that allows you to search for any image you want and even do reverse image searches.
The only drawback to this great API is the cost. With plans starting at $50 for 5,000 searches and growing to $250 for 30,000 API calls, this Google Image API can be a very costly option if you need a lot of Google Image data.
Pros: High quality and easy to use Google Image Search API which returns all the basic information you would need.
Cons: Can be expensive for larger image scraping projects and not customizable for your own particular project requirements.
3. TinEye API
TinEye API allows you to automate image searching in an ever-growing massive index of web images. It’s a perfect solution if you need to find where an image came from, its usage, and its modified versions. In cases where you need to confirm image uniqueness, you can be sure that TinEye image search API has got you covered.
The tool also provides support for numerous image query support, including PNG, JPEG, or GIF. It is thus a great way to swiftly search images that you’re working within other applications or perform your image search with screenshots. Query images can either be uploaded, dragged, and dropped, or specified by a publicly accessible image URL. It will also help you build high-performance reverse image search options.
Pricing: TinEye API searches are performed using pre-paid search bundles starting with $200 for 5,000 searches.
Pros: Scalable, high performance, and fast search through billions of images.
Cons: Doesn’t offer a free plan.
4. Zenserp API
Zenserp API enables you to scrape search engine result pages quickly and efficiently without interruption.
Specifically, their Google Image Search API enables you to scrape and access image search results on Google in real-time. You can use similar parameters as for a standard Google search when searching for an image. But then, you need to make sure that you set a search key phrase and API key to turn your search into an image search.
Zenserp image search API is also great for assembling image datasets for use in training machine learning algorithms. It provides a massive amount of settings that allow you to set the preferred image properties.
Price: You can get started by signing up for their free plan, which allows 50 requests in a month. If you need more, there are other options, including $29.99 for 5000 requests and other high volume plans of $379.99 for 100,000 requests in a month.
Pros: Super-fast, easy to use, scalable, and enables you to scrape image SERP rankings in real-time.
Cons: Costly for large amounts of requests.
5. Contextual Web Image Search API
For individuals who want the basics to get started quickly, ContextualWeb searches through billions of webpages & with a simple Google search API call can handle your query in real-time.
Its Google image API features can index images thus helping you to create a vast image database – so you can find the exact image you’re looking for.
In addition to retrieving still images, the ContextualWeb image search API provides the most recent photos for your search query.
Price: Free for up to 10,000 requests per month.
Pros: Simple to use.
Cons: Costly for professionals who may need to work on large scale projects.
6. Image Raider
Image Raider is yet another API we can’t skip from this list. It’s well-known for using Google, Yandex, and Bing to help you find matching image results.
And true to its name, the Image Raider search tool is specifically built to help with image searches. It will scour the World Wide Web when you upload an image to find its source as well as all the other webpages where it has been posted.
It is feature-rich including multi-image search capability, reverse image searches as well as allowing multiple input options for an image such as entering a page URL, adding images from the web directly, or adding images from XML Sitemap.
Price: You will get a free trial version for only 7 days. The pricing plan starts with $75 (1750 images) per month and for professional usage (10,000 images) you need to pay $300/month.
Pros: Maximum appeal to users who need to regularly search the web pages to see where their images have been published.
Cons: It is sluggish when searching for duplicate images.
7. Google Custom Search
The Google Custom Search API programmatically allows you to develop websites and applications to retrieve and display search results. With this API, you can use RESTful requests to get image search results in Atom or JSON format.
Price: Free for standard and non-profit search elements.
Paid plans for custom search JSON API and Custom Search Site Restricted JSON API. Provides 100 search queries per day for free with additional requests costing with paid plans for many requests.
Pros: Helps create custom search engines for searching images across a specified collection of sites.
Cons: Requires that you build and configure a Custom Search Engine that may require frequent code updates.
Conclusion
We’ve just shared with you our list of some of the best image search services out there. We hope you’ve enjoyed and that one of them fits your image web scraping requirements.
If you have a favorite image search engine or would like to propose a better one that we’ve missed, do let us know in the comments section below. We love hearing from our readers, and your remarks are much appreciated.
If you have any web scraping questions, contact us here, we are more than happy to discuss your particular case. Happy scraping!
