How To Download Photos From Smugmug

29-05-2021

How To Download Photos From Smugmug

How To Download Photos From Internet
How To Download Protected Photos From Smugmug
How To Download Photos From Smugmug
Smugmug Download All

As the account owner, you’ll always have peace of mind knowing you can recover your original files from any gallery by clicking the download icon in the Organizer. SmugMug Portfolio and Business accounts can sell gallery downloads and individual photos by adding them to their Pricelists.

by Martin Brinkmann on January 28, 2008 in Firefox - Last Update: December 14, 2012 - 6 comments

I would like to introduce an easy way to download lots of pictures from websites that name them sequentially, meaning they simply add a number and maybe some chars to every new picture added. Smugmug for instance uses one directory /photos/ on their website and puts all pictures, or at least links to them in that directory. All pictures look like number-M.jpg which makes it very easy to use a script to download all pictures within a certain range.

I'm going to use the Firefox extension Batch Download to download the pictures from a site like Smugmug. The CEO of Smugmug said that it was intended behavior that the private pictures at Smugmug were still publicly available which I do find a little bit odd but who am I to complain ?

Install the Batch Download Firefox extension and restart Firefox afterwards. Open the options of Batch Download afterwards, this can be done by right-clicking a blank space in Firefox and selecting Batch Download from the menu.

The Base Url is the url of the photo directory at Smugmug, in our case it is http://www.smugmug.com/photos/(*)-M.jpg. The Wildcard is the numeric part of each image that changes with each unique image. We define that part below. Since it consists only of numbers we use the numbers from 1 which would be the image 1-M.jpg to 10000 which would be image 10000-M.jpg.

Batch Download would now scan the directory photos at Smugmug for all images between 1-M.jpg and 10000-M.jpg, which means a total of 10000 images will be scanned. If an image is found it will be downloaded to the directory you specify at the bottom in the form entitled Download Folder.

The numbers that you enter are arbitrary. You could start by 10000 instead and end at 96000. It takes of course longer to download the images if you select huge numbers. This technique can be used for many different websites who save their images - or other files like videos - this way. It is furthermore possible to start over at a certain number where you stopped.

There are some ways of blocking Batch Download. The easiest way would be a referrer check which would ensure that only visitors from the same website would be allowed to download the files.

If you're one of the 75 million or so people using Flickr's photo-sharing service, you might be fretting about the future of your online photo collection right about now.

Verizon in 2017 acquired Flickr's former parent, Yahoo, and now SmugMug just acquired Flickr from Verizon, and the changing corporate priorities might have you thinking it's best to have copies of all those pictures you uploaded over the years. Or maybe the change in ownership reawakened interest in an account that's been gathering dust along with your Blogger and MySpace pages.

It used to be a pain to retrieve lots Flickr photos, but no more. Three years ago, Yahoo added a bulk download mechanism and redesigned album pages to give your photos another out.

Here's a look at the two options. Note that you'll need a computer -- the download features aren't in the phone or tablet app.

How To Download Photos From Internet

Exporting your whole Flickr collection

To get all your photos, or big batches of them, first open up your Flickr camera roll, an interface that organizes all your shots by the date they were taken. This is essentially Flickr's file-management interface, letting you select many photos that you might want to add to an album, contribute to a group, restrict to friends and family viewing -- or export. On the upper right of the screen, you can change the view to show larger or smaller thumbnails of your photos.

Next, click on the top left photo -- the most recent shot. The photo thumbnail will get a checkmark, and it'll appear in a pane across the bottom of the page.

Then comes an awkward part: selecting a group of up to 500 images, Flickr's current maximum for each download batch. Scroll down until a few dozen photos have slid by. Now hold down the shift key and click a photo to select all the photos between that shot and the first you clicked. The selected photos will get checkboxes and appear in the bottom pane. Check the left side of the pane at the bottom of the screen to see how many photos you've selected. Keep adding more photos with the shift-click technique until you approach 500. If you overshoot, you can click individual photos in the pane across the bottom to deselect them relatively swiftly.

After you've selected a batch, click the Download button at the bottom of the page. Flickr will package all the photos into a compressed file and send you a download link through Flickr's message system. You can check for Flickr messages by clicking on the bell icon in the upper right of the main Flickr.com page, but don't expect immediate gratification.

Next, repeat the selection and download process to retrieve another group of up to 500. Yes, it's a pain if you have thousands of photos, but the good news is SmugMug has said it hopes to improve the process eventually.

Exporting a Flickr album

If you don't want to export everything, you can select just a subset of photos in the camera roll. Or you can use a different approach, downloading just a single collection of photos you've collected into an album.

For this method, first go to Flickr.com, then toward the upper left click the 'You' button then the 'Albums' option.

How To Download Protected Photos From Smugmug

When you've found the album you want, hover your mouse pointer over it and click the down-arrow button that appears. Again, you'll get a notification through the Flickr message system.

First published April 23, 4:54 p.m. PT
Update, April 24 at 1:22 p.m.: Adds details about how to work around the limit of 500 photos per download batch.

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