imgdb 0.9.1

A command line IMDb search application that can also download movie posters.

Imgdb - a command line IMDb search app

This is a Python command line application that allows the user to get IMDb information about a particular title as well as downloading its corresponding poster.

Introduction

Imgdb is a play on the IMDb acronym. Since the application can also download movie posters, I added the g to IMDb to get a name that is both closer to IMDb while also representing one of the main application's functionalities at the same time. The idea behind Imgdb is to create a simple command line application that fetches information about a specific title (e.g., a movie or series) from IMDb as well as RottenTomatoes.

The application makes use of the freely available IMDb datasets to extract the required information (e.g., genres, title, rating, etc). To achieve that, Imgdb also uses Google Custom Search API to make sure the entered title is exactly what the user is looking for.

Imgdb is also capable of doing some fancy stuff by leveraging the power of ImageMagick to generate an image containing the movie's or series' ratings like so:

Requirements

Python dependencies

• beautifulsoup4
• click
• pandas
• PyYAML
• tqdm
• Wand

System dependencies

• ImageMagick

In order to use the image editing option, you should have ImageMagick installed on you system. Please, use your distribution's package manager to install it.

Installation

The easiest way to install Imgdb is to use pip:

pip install imgdb

Configuration

The application is configured using a yaml configuration file that resides in your XDG_CONFIG_HOME directory. After running the application for the first time, it will create an initial configuration file (imgdb.yaml) in the $HOME/.config/imgdb directory.

The imgdb.yaml file should have the following structure:

general:
    download: true | false
    image editing: true | false
    font: <font name>
    log file path: <path/to/log/file.log>
    update frequency: daily | weekly | bi-weekly | 1d (for 1 day) | 1h (for 1 hour) | etc
interface:
    api:
        google search api key: <google API key>
        imdb custom search id: <custom IMDb search engine ID>

You can refer to imgdb_config_template.yaml for an example configuration file.

Usage

Usage: imgdb [OPTIONS]

Options:
    --mov TEXT      The title of the movie.
    --tv TEXT       The title of the series.
    --tvmini TEXT   The title of the mini series.
    --debug TEXT    The logging level of the application.
    --logfile TEXT  The path of the log file.
    --freq TEXT     The update frequency of the datasets.
    --font TEXT     The font used to generate the rating image.
    -d              Download the movie's poster image.
    -e              Save the edited image containing the movie's ratings.
    --help          Show this message and exit.

When you run the application for the first time, it will attempt to download the required IMDb datasets from imdb.com/interfaces. You can think of them as daily snapshot of the huge IMDb database. The application needs these datasets in order to extract and display information about a specific movie or series. I opted for this solution because it allows Imgdb to fetch almost all the information from the datasets that are stored on the user's computer. This makes the application more reliable as opposed to scraping for example.

These datasets are automatically updated on a weekly basis by default. However, you can always change the automatic update frequency by using the --freq option as documented above. In most cases, you don't really need to update them very frequently. A weekly or even a bi-weekly update interval should suffice.

To use the application, you also need a Google API key as well as an IMDb custom search engine ID. You can refer to the relevant Google documentation for more information on how to get and use an API key. For creating an IMDb custom search engine (Google), you can refer to this link.

Once you have the application set up properly, you can invoke it like so:

imgdb --mov "The Dark Knight" -de

The above command will display the following information in your terminal:

Title: The Dark Knight
Genres: Action, Crime, Drama
Year: 2008
Runtime: 152 min
IMDb Rating: 9.0
RottenTomatoes Rating: 94
Description: The Dark Knight: Directed by Christopher Nolan. With 
             Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael 
             Caine. When the menace known as the Joker wreaks havoc 
             and chaos on the people of Gotham, Batman must accept 
             one of the greatest psychological and physical tests 
             of his ability to fight injustice.
➜ Downloading: The_Dark_Knight.jpg - Size: 274 KiB

100%|██████████████████████████████████| 281k/281k [00:00<00:00, 3.15MiB/s]
Edited image saved as: The_Dark_Knight_by_imgdb.png

It will also download the movie's poster (The_Dark_Knight.jpg) and save it in the current directory. The The_Dark_Knight_by_imgdb.png rating image will look something like this:

For optimal results, you should use a good design font like Maler which is the default font of the application that was used in the image above.

To get a list of installed fonts that can be used with the application, you can issue this command:

convert -list font

TODO

• Add multi result search option
• Add API-less search option
• Add JSON output