Yahoo Images Scraper

Fast, browser-free extraction of public Yahoo Image Search cards. The Actor returns original image URLs, source pages, Yahoo thumbnails, exact dimensions, reported file sizes, orientation, format metadata, regional provenance, and stable IDs without opening destination websites.

Highlights

• Single query, deduplicated multi-query batch, fair per-query quotas, and exact one-item mode
• Real Yahoo pagination (about 60 cards per page) with global image-URL deduplication
• Verified US, UK, Canada, Australia, and India Yahoo Image Search hosts
• Yahoo Safe Search plus verified size, color, and image-type filters
• Yahoo relevance or source-metadata sorting by pixels and reported file size
• Direct, Apify Residential/Datacenter, and custom proxy support with stable sessions
• Bounded retries, proxy rotation after transport failure, strict response validation, and fail-closed challenge detection
• A typed 63-field contract with recursive removal of null, undefined, empty strings, and empty collections

Input modes

Provide query, queries, or both. Duplicate query strings are removed case-insensitively.

{
  "queries": ["machine learning", "renewable energy"],
  "maxItems": 20,
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 10,
  "maxPages": 2,
  "country": "us",
  "language": "en",
  "safeSearch": "moderate",
  "size": "any",
  "color": "any",
  "imageType": "any",
  "sortBy": "relevance",
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

maxItems is the global limit. In batch mode, maxItemsPerQuery is optional; its default is a fair share of the global limit. Results are interleaved by query so the first query cannot consume the entire dataset.

Verified filters

• safeSearch: strict, moderate, off
• size: any, small, medium, large, wallpaper
• color: any, colorOnly, blackAndWhite
• imageType: any, photo, clipart, lineDrawing
• sortBy: relevance, pixelsAsc, pixelsDesc, fileSizeAsc, fileSizeDesc

The legacy empty filter values and legacy input property type remain accepted. Yahoo currently ignores its former transparency filter, so color: "transparent" is rejected rather than silently returning unfiltered data.

Output

Every record includes stable identity and positions, the original image and thumbnail URLs, the source page and domains, title, original dimensions, aspect ratio, orientation, pixel and megapixel counts, Yahoo's reported file size, query/filter context, regional host, retrieval method, timestamp, and per-query run metadata. File format, MIME type, and animation status are included only when the original URL has a recognized image extension.

Optional values Yahoo does not supply are omitted. The Actor does not invent license, stock-photo, color, engagement, authorship, or destination-page fields.

Pagination and performance

Yahoo currently returns about 60 server-rendered mobile cards per request. Default relevance mode stops as soon as the requested quota can be fulfilled. Metadata sorting inspects all pages allowed by maxPages and fetches them concurrently up to maxConcurrency. Representative 50-record direct runs complete in seconds and remain well below the requested three-to-four-minute target.

Proxy and access behavior

Direct access is the default. To use Apify Residential proxy:

{
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
    "apifyProxyCountry": "US"
  }
}

GOOGLE_SERP is a Google-only HTTP proxy and is rejected for Yahoo. Challenge/CAPTCHA pages are never solved, retried, or stored. Temporary network, rate-limit, server, and proxy transport failures use bounded backoff; a failed proxy endpoint is rotated only after a transport failure. Logs exclude raw HTML, result URLs, beacon/tracking data, cookies, and proxy credentials.

Failure semantics

• A structurally valid no-results page succeeds with an empty dataset.
• Invalid input fails before requests begin.
• Unsupported response types, selector drift, unexpected redirects, and challenge pages fail nonzero.
• No placeholder or challenge record is ever pushed.

Local development

npm ci
npm test
apify validate-schema
apify run --purge --input-file INPUT.json