Wednesday, 25 March 2015
Images are all over the internet and that’s great. Can you imagine using the internet in the mid 90’s where it was mainly just text? We use images in different ways now. At how-to blogs like Guiding Tech, we use them to guide you through a technical process. It’s much better to look at annotated screenshots than to just rely on text.
And there comes a point in life where you want to download images as well. It could be for many reasons. Downloading a single image isn’t a big deal. Right-click, hit Save As and you’re done.
But when you’re talking about a photo essay that struck your fancy, or a list of posters from a design inspiration blog that you want to save for inspiration, saving images one-by-one won’t do.
Why You Might Want to Bulk Download Images
To get the bulk download ball rolling, here are some ideas where downloading images in bulk makes sense.
- You’re at a how-to blog like Instructables, iFixit or Guiding Tech and you want to save the screenshots for some process.
- An Imgur album. You come across an awesome Imgur album full of great wallpapers or travel photos that you just can’t help but download.
- The same goes for albums on Flickr, or any other photo sharing site.
Download me easy
Your own use cases might be different. Just think of a web page where there’s maybe a dozen or more images that you want to download.
How to Bulk Download Images in Chrome
There are many Chrome extensions to get this done and I tried a handful of them. The best extension was the modestly named Image Downloader. It has around 250,000 users already and it was far less buggy than its competitors.
After downloading the extension, go to the page where all your images are and click the Image Downloader extension icon.
A drop-down menu will show up with previews of all the images on the page. Just click on the images you want to download and they’ll be highlighted with a blue border. Once you’ve made your selection, go to the top and specify a sub folder where you want the images to be saved.
Pro tip: Use the sliders for setting minimum height and width. Setting the width to around 400px means you get rid of extra website elements like icons and other extraneous fluff.
The sub folder approach is great for managing images. It’s better that just dumping all the images directly to the downloads folder.
Then, click the Download button and just like that all the images will start downloading and will show up in the folder you specified.
Alternative: Bulk Download Images(ZIG)
Bulk Download Images(ZIG) is another good bulk downloading extension with many additional features.
ZIG makes it easy to specify rules for the resolution of images (which Image Downloader also supports), image type, linked images, and a lot more. The UI is not as concise or intuitive as Image Downloader, but feature-wise, I think ZIG has the upper hand.
What Will You Bulk Download?
Now that you have the power to download a lot of images from a web page all at once, how do you plan on using it? Responsibly? For good, or for evil? A bit of both? Let us know in the comments below.
