Saving images from a web page is a fairly straightforward task: right click, choose the right option, choose descriptive filename, click save and there - 5 seconds and done! Sure this process works great… but only for a handful of images. By the time you get to the fourth or fifth image, disillusion sets in and you begin to ask yourself: “Is this really a good way to do this?”. The answer is no. There is a better way.
Download All Images browser extension for Google Chrome.
We made this extension back in 2017 because we faced the exact same problem. The task was to download over 2000 images, all contained on a single page and lazy loaded on scroll. In order to see them user had to scroll down the page. Server side crawler would not be sufficient for this client-side problem. The extensions we found in the store at the time had significant drawbacks that prevented us from using them.
The main issues with the earlier extensions were that they downloaded one image at a time resulting in the browser freezing when attempting to download a large number of images. Furthermore, the user was required to use a custom extension interface to choose which images to download. These interfaces were difficult to navigate and having to cherry-pick through images was equally inefficient as manually downloading them one at a time the native way.
We really wanted something that would be easy to launch, forget, and come back to after all processing was done.
Considering the drawbacks of the earlier solutions, we made certain strategic decisions to resolve these issues:
Single Output File - When downloading the images, all images are downloaded in the background and saved into a single zip file. This strategy is a direct response to help resolve the issues with other extensions that caused the browser to freeze under heavy load. By saving all images into a zip file first, the extension only fires 1 download event and is therefore able to save hundreds or thousands of images with ease without freezing the browser.
The extension has minimal user interface. In fact, the only real interface for this extension is its icon. This icon works as a start and stop button. Image download is initiated by clicking the extension icon. The process will run in the background and automatically download the resulting zip file when done. However, to terminate the process prematurely, the button can be clicked again causing all ongoing processing to terminate.
While the extension interface is minimal, user can process the downloaded images using their already-familiar operating system which comes out of the box with advanced features such as searching and sorting. We consider this to be much superior approach over trying to roll out our own implementation of similar features (we don’t want to reinvent the wheel!)
The extension runs inside Chrome browser which makes it cross-platform compatible with all major operating systems. Chrome extensions run in desktop versions of Chrome browser.
You can learn more about Download All Images Chrome extension on its dedicated website, or install it free from Chrome Web Store.