Streamline Your Web Content Extraction with Readability

I’d like to share Readability , a tool I’ve developed and refined over time. Its primary focus has always been straightforward: find the most prominent image on any webpage while keeping the overhead minimal.

Core Focus: Image Detection

The main strength of Readability lies in its image detection capabilities. While many similar tools try to do everything, I focused on solving one specific problem really well: finding the most prominent image on a page through dimensional analysis. The approach is simple yet effective:

1. Fetch all images from the page
2. Analyze their dimensions
3. Identify the largest one

This targeted approach has proven reliable across countless websites and use cases.

Minimal Overhead, Maximum Insight

I’ve deliberately kept the tool lightweight. Instead of parsing entire DOM trees or running complex algorithms, Readability does just what’s needed:

• Quick DOM traversal for content structure
• Efficient image size calculation
• Basic metadata extraction

The result is a fast, reliable tool that gives you exactly what you need without unnecessary processing.

Clean JSON Output

Everything returns in a straightforward JSON format:

• Page title and metadata
• Success status
• Publication dates
• Lead image URL
• Content summary
• Domain information

Common Use Cases

Over the years, users have successfully employed Readability for:

• Content aggregation platforms
• News scraping systems
• Research data collection
• Web archives
• Content analysis pipelines

Getting Started

The project is documented at Readability . Its focused feature set and clean output format make it an excellent choice for projects requiring reliable image detection and content insights.

Looking Forward

After years of refinement, Readability continues to do what it does best: find prominent images and extract key content insights with minimal overhead. If you need these capabilities in your project, check out the full documentation .