How can I webscrap images from pinterest and use them in a mobile app?

Question

I have this idea of an app and I'm a little frustrated by how much I don't know how to proceed.

My app is basically an art recommendation app.

You start with 3 base images and for each images you click on you're presented similar images with slight variation etc...

So my goal is to make this a mobile app and call it my museum.

I had the idea of just scraping pinterest.

I've noticed that pinterested has a recommendation algorithm that does basically what I want to do.

My idea was to make my program do a pinterest search based on a random keyword related to art and present the first image result to the user.

If the user like it he swipes right. If he don't the program should perform another search on pinterest with a different keyword etc...

When the user likes an image. The program must click on the image as you would do on pinterest to be presented with images similar to the one you clicked. Therefore, I would then present the first image in the search results. Keep going this way as long as the user like what he sees.

Now, how do I do this? How do I simulate a browser and user going on pinterest scraping the image etc...

How do I then make it into a mobile app. I know how to work with flutter.

I had the idea of doing the scraping with python that would be my back end and having some sort of communication with the mobile app in order to visually present the image to the user.

It all boils down to how to make my program behave like a user browsing through pinterest and taking the relevant information, to how to provide that information to a mobile app that can display it to the user.

Answer 1

Pinterest has an api

https://developers.pinterest.com/docs/

At the time of writing the website is down, but reading the blurb on google I dont think it will do the kind of thing you are attempting.

The trouble with your app is that pinterest has no interest in allowing that kind of access to their data.

Of course you can use something like selenium webdriver to download and parse the html, but its a constantly changing problem as they keep uodating the site.

It would be like trying to remove the advert posts from a facebook feed. You would be fighting against their system to make yours work.

You should look for an image service which offers an api rather than trying to scrape the data