Python: Disable images in Selenium Google ChromeDriver

Question

I spend a lot of time searching for this. At the end of the day, I combined a number of answers and it works. I share my answer and I'll appreciate it if anyone edits it or provides us with an easier way to do this.

1- The answer in Disable images in Selenium Google ChromeDriver works in Java. So we should do the same thing in Python:

opt = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

opt.add_extension("Block-image_v1.1.crx")

browser = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=opt)

2- But downloading "Block-image_v1.1.crx" is a little bit tricky because there is no direct way to do that. For this purpose, instead of going to https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-image/pehaalcefcjfccdpbckoablngfkfgfgj

you can go to http://chrome-extension-downloader.com/ and paste the extension URL there to be able to download the extension file.

3- Then you will be able to use the above-mentioned code with the path to the extension file that you have downloaded.

Answer 1

Disabling Images in Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer doesn’t provide an option for disabling images through command line, so we would need to use Registry for the same

from _winreg import *

 

key = OpenKey(HKEY_CURRENT_USER, r"Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main", 0, KEY_ALL_ACCESS)

SetValueEx(key, "Display Inline Images", 0, REG_SZ, "no")

CloseKey(key)

We just launch the browser and test it, once the images are disabled in registry, we just launch the browser and test it

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.Ie()

driver.get("https://intellipaat.com/")

Disabling Images in Firefox

We need to change the profile settings, for disabling images in Firefox. Which can be done by using the code below

from selenium import webdriver

 

profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()

# 1 - Allow all images

# 2 - Block all images

# 3 - Block 3rd party images 

profile.set_preference("permissions.default.image", 2)

 

driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)

Disabling Images in Chrome

Long ago chrome used to support a command line flag --disable-images, which was deprecated. Now we need to use the chrome.prefs of the chromedriver. For more details refer this

from selenium import webdriver

option = webdriver.ChromeOptions()

chrome_prefs = {}

option.experimental_options["prefs"] = chrome_prefs

chrome_prefs["profile.default_content_settings"] = {"images": 2}

chrome_prefs["profile.managed_default_content_settings"] = {"images": 2}

 

driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=option)

driver.get("https://intellipaat.com/")

Disabling Images in PhantomJS

PhantomJS is a headless webkit browser. It can run without an X display on a server and very useful when we want to test a website in fast mode. Disabling images on the same will make the testing more favourable.

from selenium import webdriver

driver = webdriver.PhantomJS(service_args=["--load-images=no"])

driver.get("https://intellipaat.com/")

driver.save_screenshot("intellipaat.png")

Hope this helps!

If you wish to Learn Selenium visit this Selenium Webdriver Tutorial.