You may have came across a website which contains lots of pictures, audio or video files embedded in a single webpage. Need may arise when you want to download all these files at once, instead of clicking on every single file and saving it onto your computer’s hard drive. This can be easily done using DownThemAll! add-on for Firefox web browser.
How the add-on works?
Suppose you want to download each and every image from the homepage of a Flickr photo stream of a particular person. Now instead of clicking on every image and saving them onto your hard drive, you can download all of them at once using DownThemAll!
Install the add-on for your browser and go to the Flickr photo stream of a person. Once the photo stream fully loads in your browser, right click anywhere on the web page and select DownThemAll! from the context menu. You can also go to your browser’s Tools menu >> DownThemAll! Tools and click on DownThemAll!
As soon as you click on DownThemAll!, a new window will appear which will ask you to select all the items that you want to download in batch. Go to Pictures and Embedded tab and click on Images (jpeg, png,…) OR PNG images OR JPEG images OR GIF images as per your requirements OR as per the objects present in a webpage under filters:
Select the location on your hard drive where you want to save all the files and click on Start button. The add-on will instantly start downloading all your selected files to your hard drive.
Similarly you can download audio (.mp3, .wav etc.), video (.mp4, .avi etc.), archive (.zip, .rar etc.) and software (.exe, .xpi etc.) files in bulk present in a webpage. The extension can even download almost everything present in a single web page when you select All Files under Filters.
Important Notes:
1. Even after applying proper filters, the add-on may download certain links/files present in a web page which are of no use. In such a case you may want to manually check all the links/files that you want to download onto your computer.
2. The add-on also allows you to batch download sequentially numbered files using basic syntax [start:end] OR [start:end:step]. In this syntax, start and end depicts a number or a special character, while step defines the width of the step.
For example, if you want to download pictures from 001 to 233 present in a directory /photos/ of domain abc.com, then you are required to enter http://abc.com/photos/[001:233].jpg in the Download field under Download Manager:
Download manager can be accessed by going to Tools Menu in Firefox >> DownThemAll! Tools and then click on Manager. Using the manager you can also limit the download speed of your files. The default limit is UNLIMITED, but you can always select from 10 KB/second, 50 KB/second, 100 KB/second etc.
3. Renaming mask allows you to generate file names for all your downloaded files locally on your computer. For example, if your base download directory is D:ABC and you want to download xyz.doc from http://abc.com/xyz.doc, then if you use *name*.*ext* as your renaming mask, your file will be saved as D:ABCxyz.doc.
4. If you visit the preferences of the add-on, you will be able to see/set following things for it:
- What to do if a file name already exists?
- What to do when a download is complete? The add-on can play a sound if there is an error OR whenever all downloads are complete.
- Total number of concurrent downloads and downloads per server. You can also set the total number of automatic retries and maximum retries.
- Add your own filter.
- and more…
5. If you want more information about the add-on, then you can always visit its help page.