how to fetch google images

Question

I want to fetch google images against any query. I have gone through the google image search api but unable to understand. i have also seen some methods, they fetch images but only of first page.i have used following method.

function getGoogleImg($k)
{
    $url = "http://images.google.it/images?as_q=##query##&hl=it&imgtbs=z&btnG=Cerca+con+Google&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&imgtype=&imgsz=m&imgw=&imgh=&imgar=&as_filetype=&imgc=&as_sitesearch=&as_rights=&safe=images&as_st=y";
    $web_page = file_get_contents( str_replace("##query##",urlencode($k), $url ));
    $tieni = stristr($web_page,"dyn.setResults(");
    $tieni = str_replace( "dyn.setResults(","", str_replace(stristr($tieni,");"),"",$tieni) );
    $tieni = str_replace("[]","",$tieni);
    $m = preg_split("/[\[\]]/",$tieni);
    $x = array();
    for($i=0;$i<count($m);$i++)
    {
        $m[$i] = str_replace("/imgres?imgurl\\x3d","",$m[$i]);
        $m[$i] = str_replace(stristr($m[$i],"\\x26imgrefurl"),"",$m[$i]);
        $m[$i] = preg_replace("/^\"/i","",$m[$i]);
        $m[$i] = preg_replace("/^,/i","",$m[$i]);
        if ($m[$i]!="")
        array_push($x,$m[$i]);
   }
   return $x;
}

This function return only 21 images. i want all images against this query. i am doing this in php

Answer 1

Sadly the image API is being closed down, so I wont suggest moving to that, but that would have been a nicer solution I think.

My best guess is that image 22 and forwards is being loaded using som ajax/javascript of some sort (if you search for say logo and scroll down you will see placeholders that gets loaded as you move down) and that you need to pass the page by a javascript engine and that is not something that I can find anyone who have done with php (yet). Have you checked that $web_page contains more than 21 images (when I toy against google image search it uses javascript to load some of the images)? When you access the link from your normal browser what happens then and what happens if you turn off javascript? Is there perhaps a link to next page in the result you have?

In the now deprecated Image API there were ways to limit the number of results per page and ways to step to the next page https://developers.google.com/image-search/v1/jsondevguide#json_snippets_php

If you wish to keep on doing searches and fetching images from the search result then for later http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ might be a nice alternative to look at. It fetches a html DOM and allows you to easily find nodes and makes it easy to work with them. But it still uses file_get_contents or curl libraries to fetch the data so it might need some fiddling to get javascript working.