How to find the src of an image in Selenium java?

Last Updated : 03 Oct, 2024

Selenium WebDriver is a popular automation tool used for testing web applications across different browsers. One common task in web automation is extracting information from web elements, such as retrieving the src attribute of an image. The src attribute holds the URL of the image, and Selenium provides a simple way to extract this attribute using Java.

In this guide, we will walk through the steps to get the src of an image in Selenium Java, ensuring you can easily access the image URLs on a webpage for your automation tasks.

Different ways to find the src of the image

We will be trying to find the source of the image in the following webpage which has the HTML as follows:

HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Document</title>
    <style>
        span{
            color: red;
        }
        body {
            margin: 0;
            font-size: 18px;
            display: flex;
            justify-content: center;
            align-items: center;
            flex-direction: column;
            min-height: 100vh;
            text-align: center;
        }

    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <h2>My favourite cars in <span>red</span></h2>
    <img src="https://images.classic.com/vehicles/1e7a53d12e8e002e84ff7d861f0e1a9f23597219.JPG?w=1200&h=676&fit=crop" width="420px" alt="Ferrari Testarossa">
    <img src="https://www.carscoops.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Lamborghini-Countach.jpg" width="420px" alt="Lamborghini Countach">
    <p>Made for GeeksForGeeks</p>
    <a href="https://github.com/globbertrot/images">Source Code</a>
</body>
</html>

We can see that there are two images in the webpage and to find the source of the images we will be using following Java code

Java

import org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class App {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Drivers\\chromedriver.exe"); //replcae the Path of the chrome driver

        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

        driver.get("https://globbertrot.github.io/images");

        try {
            WebElement image = driver.findElement(By.tagName("img"));
            System.out.println(image.getAttribute("src"));

        } catch (NoSuchElementException e) {}
        driver.quit();
    }  
}

Explanation

Firstly, we create a WebDriver object which visits our website containing the two images.
We are finding a web element inside the webpage using findElement() method of the driver boject.
Inside the findElement() method we specify the driver to find the element by tag name (HTML tags) i.e. img.
Once we have found the image element, we can use getAttribute() method of WebElement object which takes the attribute name as argument and returns the value associated with the particular attribute of the HTML element.

However, the above code will only work for one image and will return the source of the first image found in the entire webpage. If the webpage contains multiple images like in this case our website contains 2 images, we have to use findElements() method which will return list of elements based on the criteria.

Java

import java.util.List;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class App {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Drivers\\chromedriver.exe");

        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

        driver.get("https://globbertrot.github.io/images");

        try {
            List<WebElement> listOfImages = driver.findElements(By.tagName("img"));

            for(WebElement image: listOfImages){
                System.out.println(image.getAttribute("src"));
            }

        } catch (NoSuchElementException e) {}
        driver.quit();
    }  
}

Explanation

We have created a driver object and visited our website which contains the images.
This time we have used findElements() method of driver object which takes the element identifier as argument (in this case we are identifying the elements based on tag name).
The above method returns the list of elements matching our criteria meaning it will contain all the images present in our webpage.
Then we will iterate through the list and print out the source attribute individually for all image present inside the list.
Also, in case there are no images present in the website, we are catching the NoSuchElementException which is thrown if the driver is unable to find elements matching our criteria.

Instead of finding elements by their tag name, we can also find elements based upon their class name, id name, xpath or css selectors which makes it flexible and easy to select specific images from the entire webpage.

driver.findElement(By.className("image-class")); // Selects element having class attribute equal to "image-class"
 driver.findElement(By.id("image-id")); // Selects element having id attribute equal to "image-id"
 driver.findElement(By.xpath("//img[2]")); // Selects second image from the webpage
 driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#image-id")); // Selects element having id attribute equal to "image-id"

Output

Conclusion

By using Selenium WebDriver in Java, you can easily get the src of an image on any webpage, which is especially useful for validating images or extracting URLs during automation. Simply use the getAttribute("src") method on an image element, and Selenium will return the image's URL.

This process simplifies web scraping and testing when dealing with images on a site. For reliable automation, always ensure your Selenium setup is correctly configured with the latest drivers using WebDriverManager.