Hoga-Boga

by Gina Trapani

When it comes to heavy duty download jobs, Firefox's default Downloads manager just doesn't cut the mustard. If you often need closer control of multiple, large downloads, you need the DownThemAll! Firefox add-on. This extra-strength download manager can speed up, queue for later, and batch download sets of files from the web based on patterns you define in one click.

Today we'll use DownThemAll to grab all the MP3's from a web page as well as an entire set of Flickr photos in one click. Sound fun? Let's get this downloading party started.

Using filters: Download all the MP3's on a page

When you right click and choose DownThemAll from the context menu on a web page, dTa presents a list of possible downloads from that page - every single link that exists there, whether it's to another web page or a piece of media, like an image, video or MP3. The power in dTa is the Filters area, where you define a pattern that selects the files you want to download from the often long and crowded list.

So if you were at Lifehacker's sibling site, Idolator, which features MP3 downloads regularly, you might just want to suck down all the music from the front page in one click. Here's how to do so:

1. Define your filter. In DownThemAll's Preferences area, go to the Filters tab. There you'll see several pre-defined file filters (like Archives (zip, rar) and Videos (mpeg, avi, wmv.)) In the Extensions column, there's a regular expression which defines the file filter. Add one for MP3 files. The Caption can be "*.mp3" and the Filtered Extensions should be /\/[^\/\?]+\.mp3$/, as shown:
   
   
   Hit OK to save your new filter.
2. Select all the MP3's with your filter. Then, on the front page of Idolator or your favorite MP3 blog, right click and choose DownThemAll. Click on the MP3 filter checkbox to select only the music files linked on the page for download- just 12 out of 97, in this case - as shown:
   
   
   Be sure to select the destination directory on your hard drive as well in the Save files in: area.
3. Custom rename files. Another cool feature of dTa is the ability to set the downloaded filenames using different variables, like date and time and order number. In the Renaming mask dropdown, choose the pattern the downloaded file names should use. Hit the little paper clip note button to see the Renaming tags reference table, as shown:
   
4. Queue or start your download. From there, hit up the Start button to begin sucking down the tracks from the web. Alternately, if you don't want to use the bandwidth now, hit the Queue button (a kind of light download bookmarking tool) to set up the files in dTa for kicking off later on.

Advanced filtering: Download the original images from an entire Flickr set

Another interesting use of DownThemAll is to save all the images on a web page to your hard drive. This comes in especially handy if you want to grab a whole album or gallery of photos, like a Flickr set. The only problem is that when you're viewing a Flickr set page, you can only see the image thumbnails; but with a little help from our friend Greasemonkey, you can download the original, large images from Flickr in one click. Here's how.

1. Install the Link Original Image user script. Since DownThemAll only detects the links present on the current web page, you have to expose the links to the original Flickr images on a set page to download them. That's exactly what the Flickr - Link Original Image Greasmonkey user script does. Install that critter (provided you're running Greasemonkey) and voila! When you look at pages of Flickr photos, links to the original images will be present, as shown:
   
2. Filter original image links. Now, invoke the DownThemAll file selection box, and check off the Images filter, which will select all of the set original images (which are also, coincidentally, all named something_o.xx, and could be filtered that way.) Then start or queue your download. [via Vikingo's pub]

One-click access to dTa settings

Once you've got a set of dTa preferences set up that you want to reuse over and over again - say, if you want to download several Flickr sets on different pages - you want to use dTaOneClick!, also available on your right-click context menu. From the help:

dTaOneClick! will start downloading all the links/pictures of the current webpage that will match the filters used in the last dTa! session. Downloads will be saved in the last setted destination path and will be renamed using the last setted [sic] renaming mask.

The one thing you can't do with dTa that you can with my beloved command line wget is schedule regular, recurring downloads (like all the MP3's from Idolator every day at noon). However, DownThemAll's graphical interface and Firefox integration is a lot easier to deal with than command line parameters.

How do you use DownThemAll, or another download manager? Let us know in the comments.

Gina Trapani, the editor of Lifehacker, loves a good list of completed downloads. Her semi-weekly feature, Geek to Live, appears every Wednesday and Friday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Geek to Live feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

# posted by Khaled A. @ 8:10 AM 1 comments