Hundreds of detailed feature car pics online and how to easily download them

Tom G. (noac) emailed me a month ago to point me to a huge amount of pictures of low mileage and near original feature cars that he found online.

1992 Feature Car on Picasa Web
1993 White Feature Car on Marc Schiliro’s Classic Cars
1993 Yellow Feature Car on Photo Bucket

Tom thought I would want to download them for my archives. And I did. I thought I would not only share the links but also how I efficiently downloaded them.

There was no way I was right clicking to ‘save as’ on each and every one of the pictures. I have better things to do with my time so I employed the use of DownThemAll! a Firefox browser plugin that mass downloads files from web sites.

It’s interesting because each of these sites requires a slightly different approach to get to the full size images. The 1993 triple white pictures are the easiest. First, go to the page. Next, invoke DownThemAll! via Tools > DownThemAll! Tools > DownThemAll!. Switch to the ‘Pictures and Embedded’ tab and select the 73 images.

DownThemAll! in action

Choose a location to Save files in and click Start. A few minutes later the images will be on your computer!

Photo Bucket requires a slightly more sophisticated approach. The page you go to is a list of thumbnailed images.

Thumbnailed images on Photo Bucket

If you use DownThemAll! as just instructed you will get the thumbnails. But, if you click on a thumbnail to view an image and then right click on it and view its properties you can find the actual full size image address. In this case, the first one is:

http://i156.photobucket.com/albums/t12/bullitt18/1993%20Mustang%20Feature%20Car/1993Mustang015.jpg

The rest of the images following sequentially up to 1993Mustang134.jpg. In a case like this with such uniformly named images, a spreadsheet is the perfect tool to generate some code for a temporary web page with links to those images. You can then use DownThemAll! against those generated links.

I prefer OpenOffice Calc but Excel will work just as well. Essentially, you use one column to generate the list of the image numbers (15 to 134) and a second column to use the spreadsheet’s CONCATENATE function to build the links. It’s too much to go into here so I’ll just include the spreadsheets for those who want to see the details:

PhotoBucket.xls (Excel 2000)
PhotoBucket.ods (Open Office 2.0)

The result is a web page from which you can download the files from using DownThemAll! You can generate and open this web page locally on your computer. You will need to wrap the generated code from the spreadsheet in HTML and BODY tags. If that is beyond what you care to know here’s my version so you can just get to downloading. Note that this time when using DownThemAll! you want to be on the Links tab and Filter to JPEG images as the images are linked and not embedded in the page.

The last image host, PicasaWeb gets even more interesting. The person posting these images has disabled the PicasaWeb feature that would give us the ability to download them. They also disabled the ability to get an RSS feed for them which can also be used to work around the download restriction.

Alas, there was no choice but to take a brute force approach with this one. I viewed the source for the page from which I was able to extract the URLs for each full size image. It was kind of a pain to manually parse through it so here’s the web page that I generated for use with DownThemAll! I can’t guarantee that these links will continue to work. I created the links a couple days ago and just found that they now vary slightly from those original links so I had to revise the whole lot. So, if you want them you had better get them fast.

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