Given an IMDB movie id, how do I programmatically get its poster image?

Question

movie id tt0438097 can be found at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0438097/

What\'s the url for its poster image?

Answer 1

Here is my program to generate human readable html summary page for movie companies found on imdb page. Change the initial url to your liking and it generates a html file where you can see title, summary, score and thumbnail.

npm install -g phantomjs

Here is the script, save it to imdb.js

var system = require('system');

var page = require('webpage').create();
page.open('http://www.imdb.com/company/co0026841/?ref_=fn_al_co_1', function() {
  console.log('Fetching movies list');
  var movies = page.evaluate(function() {
    var list = $('ol li');
    var json = []
    $.each(list, function(index, listItem) {
      var link = $(listItem).find('a');
      json.push({link: 'http://www.imdb.com' + link.attr('href')});
    });
    return json;
  });
  page.close();

  console.log('Found ' + movies.length + ' movies');

  fetchMovies(movies, 0);
});

function fetchMovies(movies, index) {
  if (index == movies.length) {
    console.log('Done');

    console.log('Generating HTML');
    genHtml(movies);

    phantom.exit();
    return;
  }
  var movie = movies[index];

  console.log('Requesting data for '+ movie.link);

  var page = require('webpage').create();
  page.open(movie.link, function() {
    console.log('Fetching data');
    var data = page.evaluate(function() {
      var title = $('.title_wrapper h1').text().trim();
      var summary = $('.summary_text').text().trim();
      var rating = $('.ratingValue strong').attr('title');
      var thumb = $('.poster img').attr('src');

      if (title == undefined || thumb == undefined) {
        return null;
      }
      return { title: title, summary: summary, rating: rating, thumb: thumb };
    });

    if (data != null) {
      movie.title = data.title;
      movie.summary = data.summary;
      movie.rating = data.rating;
      movie.thumb = data.thumb;
      console.log(movie.title)
      console.log('Request complete');
    } else {
      movies.slice(index, 1);
      index -= 1;
      console.log('No data found');
    }
    page.close();
    fetchMovies(movies, index + 1);
  });
}

function genHtml(movies) {
  var fs = require('fs');

  var path = 'movies.html';
  var content = Array();

  movies.forEach(function(movie) {
    var section = '';

    section += '
';
    section += '
'+movie.title+'
';
    section += '
'+movie.summary+'
';
    section += '
'+movie.rating+'
';
    section += '';
    section += '
';

    content.push(section);
  });

  var html = ''+content.join('\n')+'';

  fs.write(path, html, 'w');
}

And run it like so

phantomjs imdb.js