How to get images of Discogs releases?

Question

I want to get images of Discogs releases. Can I do it without Discogs API? They don't have links to the images in their db dumps.

Answer 1

To do this without the API, you would have to load a web page and extract the image from the html source code. You can find the relevant page by loading https://www.discogs.com/release/xxxx where xxxx is the release number. Since html is just a text file, you can now extract the jpeg URL.

I don't know what your programming language is, but I'm sure it can handle String functions, like indexOf and subString. You could extract the html's OG:Image content for picture.

So taking an example: https://www.discogs.com/release/8140515

• Find the .indexOf("og:image\" content=\"); save as startPos to some integer.
• That's 19 chars so next do a .indexOf(".jpg", startPos + 19); into a endPos.
  This gets the first occurence of .jpg after index of startPos + 19 any other chars.

• Now extract a subString from html text img_URL = myHtmlStr.substring(startPos+19, endPos);

• You should end up with a string reading like this below (extracted URL):
  https://img.discogs.com/_zHBK73yJ5oON197YTDXM7JoBjA=/fit-in/600x600/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-8140515-1460073064-5890.jpeg.jpg

• The process can be shortened to finding the startPos index of https://img., then find first occurrence of .jpg when searching from after that startPos index. Extract within that length range. This is because the image URL is only mentioned in the html source at https://img.

Compare page at : https://www.discogs.com/release/8140515 with extracted URL image below.

Answer 2

This is how to do it with Java & Jsoup library.

• get HTML page of the release
• parse HTML & get <meta property="og:image" content=".." /> to get content value

import java.io.IOException;
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;
import org.jsoup.select.Elements;

public class DiscogRelease {

    private final String url;

    public DiscogRelease(String url) {
        this.url = url;
    }

    public String getImageUrl() {
        try {
            Document doc = Jsoup.connect(this.url).get();
            Elements metas = doc.head().select("meta[property=\"og:image\"]");
            if (!metas.isEmpty()) {
                Element element = metas.get(0);
                return element.attr("content");
            }
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            Logger.getLogger(DiscogRelease.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        }
        return null;
    }

}