Save Image

Download images, GIFs, and media from any URL using proper headers, Referer spoofing, and scraping to handle CDNs and social media sources correctly.

Never guess at direct image URLs. Never use bare curl with no headers. Always pick the right tool.

Decision Tree

text

What are you downloading?
├── GIF or meme search (no specific URL) → gifgrep
├── Video or social media (YouTube, TikTok, Twitter/X, Instagram, Reddit) → yt-dlp
├── Image URL from a CDN-protected site (Imgur, KnowYourMeme, Reddit, etc.) → two-step scrape
└── Plain image URL (direct .jpg/.png/.gif link, no CDN) → curl with headers

See references/tools.md for tool-specific flags and examples.

Rule 1: Always send browser headers

Never do bare curl <url>. CDNs check Referer and User-Agent and block bot-looking requests.

Minimum headers for any curl image fetch:

bash

curl -s "<url>" \
  -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \
  -H "Referer: <origin-of-the-page-hosting-the-image>" \
  -H "Accept: image/webp,image/apng,image/*,*/*;q=0.8" \
  -o <output-file>

Use scripts/fetch-image.sh for a ready-made wrapper.

Rule 2: Two-step scrape for CDN images

If you don't have a direct image URL (or a guessed URL fails), scrape the page first:

bash

# Step 1: Scrape the page for real CDN image URLs
curl -s "<page-url>" \
  -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 ..." \
  | grep -oE 'https://[a-z0-9._-]+\.(com|net|org)/[^"]+\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|webp)' \
  | head -10

# Step 2: Download the URL you want with Referer set to the page
curl -s "<image-url>" \
  -H "Referer: <page-url>" \
  -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 ..." \
  -o <output-file>

Rule 3: Verify the download

Always confirm you got an actual image, not an HTML error page:

bash

file <output-file>
# Should say: JPEG image data / PNG image data / GIF image data
# NOT: HTML document / ASCII text

Quick Examples

GIF search (no URL):

bash

gifgrep "distracted boyfriend" --download --max 1

KnowYourMeme / CDN-protected image:

bash

# Scrape page → get URL → fetch with Referer
curl -s "https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge" -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0..." \
  | grep -oE 'https://i\.kym-cdn\.com/[^"]+\.(jpg|png|gif)' | head -3
# Then fetch the URL with Referer: https://knowyourmeme.com/

Direct image URL:

bash

bash scripts/fetch-image.sh "https://example.com/image.jpg" ~/Downloads/image.jpg "https://example.com"

Video/social media:

bash

yt-dlp "<url>" -o ~/Downloads/%(title)s.%(ext)s