linkpreview

What it is and what it does

linkpreview is a Python library that fetches and parses web page metadata to generate link previews. It gathers data from multiple sources—OpenGraph and Twitter Card meta tags, Microdata, JSON-LD markup, generic HTML tags (h1, p, img), and URL structure—then extracts and normalizes fields like title, description, image, site name, and favicon. The library can either accept pre-fetched HTML content or automatically retrieve it from a URL using requests.

You provide a URL and optionally HTML content, and get back a preview object with standardized fields. It supports custom HTTP headers, preset user-agent profiles (Firefox, Chrome, Googlebot, Twitterbot, etc.), and optional lxml parsing for better performance. The library handles relative URLs by converting them to absolute paths and works with pre-parsed BeautifulSoup objects if you already have one.

Use it for:

• Generate rich link previews in a chat or messaging application by fetching title, description, and image from shared URLs.
• Build a web scraper that collects structured metadata from multiple sites for indexing or comparison.
• Create a social media sharing widget that displays preview cards before users post a link.
• Extract favicon and site name from URLs for bookmark managers or link aggregators.
• Parse and validate OpenGraph metadata on your own site to ensure social media sharing displays correctly.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Extracts preview metadata (title, description, image, site name, favicon) from web URLs by parsing OpenGraph, Twitter Card, Microdata, JSON-LD, and HTML tags.

Yes, if you need link preview extraction and can accept aging maintenance. The library is straightforward, has no known vulnerabilities, and handles the common metadata formats well. Install it if you're building a feature that displays rich link previews; skip it if you need active maintenance or support for cutting-edge HTML5 standards.

Install

linkpreview on PyPI

pip install linkpreview

uv add linkpreview

poetry add linkpreview

Installing linkpreview

Before you install

Low friction install with two common dependencies (requests, beautifulsoup4). Package is aging—last release was 364 days ago—so maintenance responsiveness is unclear, though no recent vulnerabilities are known.

License in practice

MIT license is permissive; you can use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial or private projects with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart

from linkpreview import link_preview

preview = link_preview("http://github.com/")
print(preview.title)
print(preview.description)
print(preview.image)

Verify before relying

• Whether the package actively maintains compatibility with Python versions beyond 3.10 or newer Python releases.
• Performance characteristics when parsing large or malformed HTML documents.
• Whether lxml is truly optional or required for acceptable performance in production use.

Package facts

Evidence: linkpreview-0.12.1-py3-none-any.whl

Keywords: link, preview, web, htmlparse, schema.org, opengraph, twittercard, url

Tags

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