The Splosh UK Forum

been meaning to ask this for ages...

As I've mentioned |in | other | posts |, by day I work as a web geek.

I've written a little Java/JSP web app that I use to download gallery images from membership sites. The concept is simple... most member sites have galleries that contain images that are numbered, eg. image001.jpg, image002.jpg etc...

My web app simply creates a web page that contains lots of images, starting with the first image in the gallery, eg. image001.jpg and ending with the last image, eg. image150.jpg, using a simple loop. This saves me from manually viewing each image and saving it (as I used to do before I made the app)

I got the kernel of the idea from the original crazygirls.org site, where instead of offering .zip files of galleries, as many sites do, they had static versions of the pages my app creates dynamicaly. To download a gallery you just opened the page, wait for it to finish downloading then save the page. It saves an HTML page to your hard drive along with a supporting folder that contains all the images....

My app works in the same way, except I can input the base url (eg. snakewam.com/memberspics/set1/) the starting number (eg. 001), the finishing number (eg. 150) and the suffix (eg. .jpg). I then let it load (a javascript function tells me when its done) then I save it and move onto the next gallery....

so, my question is..... does anyone else do this or something similar?

really? nobody?

Well somebody perhaps... Different technology though.

I have (or had) a lttle Internet Explorer extension that watched me load pages. Once a page loaded it then had a button to automatically edit the page, replacing thumbnails with the images they linked to - it has a tool to specify and discover the rules to do that for each web site. Finally it could then bulk download all the images on the resulting page.

Haven't used it in a long while, I now vary rarely save stills.

I did it in Visual Studio. I guess people with sites would rather you didn't, but OTOH if you subscribed, then maybe they should look at just offering ZIP files.

rich_d_rich wrote:I did it in Visual Studio....

haraahh!!! I'm not alone!

rich_d_rich wrote:...I guess people with sites would rather you didn't....

really? do people that have site who are reading this agree?

rich_d_rich wrote:...maybe they should look at just offering ZIP files....

ZIP files are really useful but not if it means their server is cramped for space. If that is the case then they could offer what crazygirls did and have a simple page with all the full size images - this would only add a few kB to their site and would make downloading a whole photoset much easier

thanks for your comment - glad to know that someone else has done this....