{"id":23426,"library":"cinemagoer","title":"Cinemagoer (formerly IMDbPY)","description":"Cinemagoer (previously IMDbPY) is a Python package for accessing and retrieving data from IMDb's database. It scrapes movie, person, character, and company data from IMDb web pages. Version 2023.5.1 is the latest release. The project is now under maintenance mode with occasional fixes.","status":"maintenance","version":"2023.5.1","language":"python","source_language":"en","source_url":"https://github.com/cinemagoer/cinemagoer","tags":["imdb","movie","scraping","cinema"],"install":[{"cmd":"pip install cinemagoer","lang":"bash","label":"Install latest stable release"}],"dependencies":[{"reason":"Required for HTML parsing of IMDb pages","package":"lxml","optional":false},{"reason":"Required for HTTP requests to IMDb","package":"requests","optional":false}],"imports":[{"note":"Since 2022.1.16, the main access class is Cinemagoer; IMDb is a deprecated alias.","wrong":"from imdb import IMDb","symbol":"IMDb","correct":"from imdb import Cinemagoer"}],"quickstart":{"code":"from imdb import Cinemagoer\n\n# Create an instance of the Cinemagoer class\nia = Cinemagoer()\n\n# Search for a movie\nresults = ia.search_movie('The Dark Knight')\nfor movie in results:\n    print(movie.movieID, movie['title'])\n\n# Get a movie by ID\nmovie = ia.get_movie('0468569')\nprint(movie['title'], movie['year'])","lang":"python","description":"Basic usage: search for movies and retrieve a movie by ID."},"warnings":[{"fix":"Change import from 'from imdb import IMDb' to 'from imdb import Cinemagoer'.","message":"Renamed package: IMDbPY has been renamed to cinemagoer. The old 'IMDb' class is deprecated; use 'Cinemagoer' instead.","severity":"breaking","affected_versions":">=2022.1.16"},{"fix":"Catch IMDbError exceptions or use the 'reraise_exceptions' parameter to control behavior.","message":"Exceptions raised by default: Since 2022.1.16, by default exceptions are raised on errors instead of returning None. Previously, some methods returned None on failure.","severity":"breaking","affected_versions":">=2022.1.16"},{"fix":"Implement request throttling and caching to avoid IP bans.","message":"Scraping heavy: The library scrapes IMDb's website, which can be slow and may be blocked if too many requests are made. Use caching and respect IMDb's robots.txt.","severity":"gotcha","affected_versions":"all"},{"fix":"Report issues on GitHub and consider using an official IMDb API if available.","message":"Data format changes: IMDb regularly changes its HTML structure, so parsers can break unexpectedly. The library is maintenance-mode, so fixes may be delayed.","severity":"gotcha","affected_versions":"all"}],"env_vars":null,"last_verified":"2026-05-01T00:00:00.000Z","next_check":"2026-07-30T00:00:00.000Z","problems":[{"fix":"Run 'pip install cinemagoer' (not 'pip install imdb'). Then import from 'imdb'.","cause":"The package has been renamed to cinemagoer; installing cinemagoer creates a package named 'imdb'.","error":"ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'imdb'"},{"fix":"Use 'from imdb import Cinemagoer' and instantiate with 'ia = Cinemagoer()'.","cause":"Using old import 'from imdb import IMDb' with cinemagoer >= 2022.1.16; the class was renamed to Cinemagoer.","error":"AttributeError: module 'imdb' has no attribute 'IMDb'"}],"ecosystem":"pypi","meta_description":null,"install_score":null,"install_tag":null,"quickstart_score":null,"quickstart_tag":null}