Image Fetch and Save

[SkydiveUK24]

Hello,

I have just recently changed suppliers and unfortunately the new supplier does not offer an image pack of their products to download. They do, however have a dedicated image server which they say I can link to or if I can find a way of downloading them myself, I can do that also. I do not want to link to their images for several reasons and downloading over 4000 images manually - well say no more! Basically what I am trying to ask is, does anybody know of a simple script or something that will fetch the images from their servers and save to mine?

The images are linked as follows:

supplierswebsite.com/images/product/productsku100/image.gif
supplierswebsite.com/images/product/productsku200/image.gif
supplierswebsite.com/images/product/productsku300/image.gif

and so on...

I have an excel file containing all product image links.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[fairestcape]

Do ALL the images have the name "image.gif" ? (Is it just that the directories are different?)

If they ALL have the same name, you've got a challenge on your hands!

I have heard that there are macros that can be used to grab and save images off remote sites. Do a search on iopus, and imacro for firefox.

The macro will probably work only if the images have unique file names.

[SkydiveUK24]

Thanks for the reply.

The images all have different names, as do the directories. The thing is, the supplier will not allow you to browse the directories (get a 403) you can only use for example:

supplierswebsite.com/images/productsku100/image.gif

to grab the image. There are, for instance 10 images in one products folder, but I can't download all 10 unless I put the EXACT url in one by one.

I have tried iopus briefly, however due to the supplier not allowing you to browse directories, it seems it will only download one image at a time again until I changed the config to download the next one.

Thank-you for the info though, appreciated. I am sure there is a way of doing this that I am missing...

[fairestcape]

OK, Here's what I have...

To copy images off remote website:-

The method is crude, but works. You first need to download a little free tool, the iOpus Downloader from here: http://www.iopus.com/freeware/downloader/

That's the meat of it.

Next we need to automate the download, so first we need to create some files containing the urls of the images we want. Use the spreadsheet from the supplier website, remember to deleted the items you don’t want to sell.

Copy the column that contains the image links and paste this into notepad.

You'll need to split this list up into smaller files, as there is a limit to what the XP command line can cope with. Keep the files to under 20KB if possible.

Now you have the downloader program, plus a few text files containing urls, one per line.

In notepad create batch files (xxxxx.bat)
(Name your .bat file any name you want - such as getpics.bat) containing just this line of code:

FOR /f %%a in (products.txt) do Downloader.exe -download %%a


. . . where products.txt is the file containing the urls we created above (so different in each batch file, e.g. products1.txt etc.).


All that's left to do is run the batch file - changing product.txt to product1.txt, product2.txt to grab the images in each list, and it will go off and download the images!

You RUN the BAT file(s) by using "Run" under your windows START menu.

If some of the image files are missing, the downloader sits doing nothing. Just click the cancel button in the dialog box and it'll continue with the next image.

[SkydiveUK24]

Well all I can say is...

Thank-you so much!

You have saved me from another day of headaches.

Images are downloading as I type this.

Only problem is, the image filenames are messed up. Most have got '[1'.jpg or the ends have been cut off.

Does this have a limit on the amount of characters in the image filename as it cuts off the ends after 8 characters and most of them are at least 11 long?

[fairestcape]

Hmmm... it may truncate to 8 characters... There may be a fix, but I'm not sure of it.

[wmanning]

had the same problem, so I had to D/L all the images then upload to my server.

I used wget for windows. It is a command line program but it works great.
Copy the colum with image urls to a text file save it to c:

you can get the program wget from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnu....4-1-setup.exe

install it
open a cmd prompt e.g. start | run | type: cmd
in the command prompt type cd.. press enter
type this again till you get to just the c:
type wget -i c:\textfile.txt (replace this with the name of the textfile you created)
let it run till it d/l all your images

you will now have a folder with all the images as they were on the remote server

Hope this helps and good luck..

[fairestcape]

I used wget for windows. It is a command line program but it works great.

This sounds better and easier than iopus... Thanks a TON !

[marcochampo]

i just came across a problem not sure how to solve it ,while downloading from remote site , using wget, most of the files it fetched ended up with a extra extention number after .jpg
example--
http://richimage.carphonewarehouse.c...RONT_LARGE.jpg

wget returned ALCATEL-OT-980_BLACK_FRONT_LARGE.jpg.12

there are 1200 images in this batch .. a small percentage got fetched with the right file format

anyone have any ideas
thanks champo