download managers for firefox

Although we typically steer clear of overly-techie topics here @ UM, I wanted to cover two free downloads that have come in handy for solving a specific problem recently.

I had purchased access to several, ahem ‘galleries’ online and recently, the site featuring them has decided to close its doors.  Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue because it’s easy enough to just save off pictures using right click (yes, I’m on a PC) or whatever.

This particular site, likely in a bid to reduce piracy, had a very strange method of displaying its pictures (in a somewhat locked down proprietary browser) and therefore this wasn’t as easy as it sounds (not to mention the fact that there were several galleries in question, each of which had 60-90 pictures.. aka a whole lotta right clicking would have been going on).

Google to the rescue then, pointing me in the direction of two great plugins that saved me hours of time in downloaded the pictures in question.

The first order of business as creating a ‘gallery’ of my own in a single browser window.  This was made easy with Flash Got, a download manager that features a ‘Build Gallery’ function which allows you to create dynamic URLs based on numeric ranges.  For instance, if there are 50 pictures that are named FullyClothedGirl1.jpg, FullyClothedGirl2.jpg, etc, you can simply input the URL as www.TotallyInnocentSiteThat’sSoNotPorn.com/FullyClothedGirl[1-50].jpg and Flash Got will pull up all the pictures in one browser window.

Next, I wanted to download them all to my hard drive.  For this, I used DownLoadThemAll a download manager that like FlashGot, will dynamically create structured file names for every image appearing in a browser window.

Using these two plug ins in tandem saved me hours upon hours of work, and kept me from losing out on continued viewing of my, um, nature photography.