Bulk Image Downloader is ideal for users who want to download pictures from the Internet, lots of pictures. Best of all? The program follows links to grab the original pictures right away and not the thumbnails. But more about that later.

Bulk Image Downloader Review

The main program window looks clean and it takes little configuration to start downloading images from the Internet. There are two things that users need to check first. The configuration should be the first visit. A lot of settings can be changed in here, from proxy settings to resuming downloads, downloading from multiple forum pages and web browser integration.

The config leads to an advanced configuration window as well which users should pay a visit to at least once. Here it is possible to define a minimum image size that should be downloaded, configure video download types on supported sites, maintain an ignore and include list or use regular expressions to make custom sites or image hosting services compatible with the program. Most users on the other hand do not need to do this. The developers are shipping the software with support for dozens of popular image hosting sites and gallery formats. Plus, they maintain the list and update it regularly. Still, experienced users may use it to add unsupported websites to the program.

Here is a selection of websites and services that are currently supported by BID.

• Facebook
• Picasa
• MySpace
• Flickr
• Image hosting websites like imagehost, share-image, twitpic, deviantart and hundreds more

Users have two options to download images in bulk with the help of Bulk Image Download. They can copy a web address manually and paste it into the site, or use the browser context menu to send it to the program. Bulk Image Download supports Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera currently. All users need to do to download all images from a page is to right-click on that page to send the page to the program.

The image downloader scans the page, and if available additional numbered pages (usually the first 20 pages, for instance of a Flickr search or forum thread).

Pictures that have been identified are listed in thumbnail form in the program interface.

The view-mode can be changed, as can be the selection of which images will be downloaded by the downloader. Four additional view modes are available, from a plain listing, to a mixed listing with thumbnails and information to medium and large thumbnails.

The default selection will only download full sized images of thumbnails. This can be changed to downloading embedded images only or to download all images on the pages. The default option is usually the one that works best on all pages.

All images are automatically added to a queue, and users can either start downloading them directly by clicking on the download icon, or add other pages from the same or new websites to it. It is important in this case to check the “append to existing links” box to add the new pages to the existing queue.

Bulk Image Downloader will skip images that already exist in the save folder by default. This can be changed to overwriting or renaming instead. The software uses ten download threads to download images. Users with slow Internet connections may want to reduce the number of threads, especially if they download from sites where large images are posted.

Those features alone are excellent. But what if I told you that there is more to the program than meets the eye? You may encounter websites that use numbers in their web address to distinguish galleries or pages on their site.

Lets assume a site uses the http://example.com/index.php?page=1 format to display its pages. page=2 would load the second page and so on. All pages can host galleries or direct images, that does not matter for Bulk Image Downloader as it can handle both well.

Instead of adding http://example.com/index.php?page=1, and then page=2, page=3 and so on to the program manually users could instead use following syntax: http://example.com/index.php?page=[1-20]. This tells Bulk Image Downloader to scan the pages 1 to 20 for images and add those found to the program queue. Heavy image downloaders can save lots of time this way.

BID supports pages that require basic HTTP authentication or cookie authentication. The help explains how this needs to be configured properly.

Bulk Image Downloader features

• Image Host Support – BID works with almost all popular image hosting sites, such as flickr, imagevenue, imagefap, imageshack, imagebam, etc.
• Social Networking Sites – BID supports album downloading from sites such as facebook, myspace, and twitter related hosts like tweetphoto.com, twitpic.com, yfrog.com
• Full Sized Images – BID uses an advanced heuristic scoring method to locate full sized images. This means BID can work on most galleries automatically, with no user configuration necessary.
• Batch Downloading – Automatically download from huge lists of gallery URLs via the integrated Queue Manager.
• Web Browser Integration – BID integrates with IE, Opera, FireFox and Chrome. Just right click inside your browser window and select “Open current page with BID”
• Web Forum Support – BID can scan multi page forum threads and quickly extract all image links
  Multi Page Gallery Downloads – BID can detect and download from most popular multi page web galleries out of the box.
• Password Protected Websites – BID will prompt for user names and passwords if the web site requires them.
• Video Downloading – It’s not just for images – BID also supports VIDEO downloading from YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, MegaVideo, as well as directly linked video files (.avi, .wmv, .mpeg, .mov, .flv, etc)
• Embedded images – Apart from locating and downloading full sized imaged, BID can also download images embedded on a page
• Sequenced image filenames (fusker) – BID supports ‘ranged’ URLs for sequenced image downloading. e.g. http://mysite/pics/image[001-100].jpg
• Image Validation – BID checks every image to make sure it’s been downloaded correctly. Invalid images are retried automatically.
• Resume Downloads – BID will resume downloads from the point at which the connection was broken.
• Multi Threaded Downloading – BID can download up to 50 images at once. Download those galleries quickly!
• Redirection Resolution -Some sites use image redirection “services” like imagecash, urlcash etc. to display adverts before redirecting to the imagehost. BID automatically resolves these types of links.
• File name unmangling – BID will retrieve the correct file name from image hosts that scramble filenames (where possible), such as imagevenue, imagefap.
• Generate File names – Optionally create your own sequenced file names for image hosts that scramble the file names,
• Export Galleries to HTML or BB Code – Quickly generate gallery code suitable for pasting into web forums.
• Advanced Configuration – BID has many advanced settings for things like Javascript processing, redirection handling, and more for those tricky galleries that thwart BID’s download attempts. We’re happy to help out with these settings if you get stuck – just contact us

Bulk Image Downloader Verdict

Bulk Image Downloader is an excellent image downloader for the Windows operating system. It is comfortable to use, offers intelligent features that make life easier, a configuration with lots of extras and settings and a dedicate development team that responds quickly and enthusiastically. I have not looked back since I installed BID on my system.

Bulk Image Downloader Giveaway

Antibody Software, the developers of Bulk Image Downloader, donated 15 one-year licenses of the program. Just comment below for a chance to win one of the licenses in this giveaway. Good luck everyone.

A fully functional trial version is available for download at the developer website, I suggest you give it a try.

Sniping is a practice that has been used for years and years. Originally this was a manual process, where users made a bid in the closing seconds of an auction. This naturally could prove risky, as internet connections can fail and bids can’t go through. Automated services also exist which are often more reliable but can prove insecure and often charge a small fee. A few years back, I used Hammersnipe which offers free sniping and I didn’t have a bad experience, although neither I or gHacks are providing a recommendation as I suggest doing a lot of research in any sniping service before you use them. This is seen as controversial, though.

One of my favourite tactics is to bid completely random amounts. Instead of 14.00GBP, I bid 14.01GBP. This is because that way, if someone had bid 14.00GBP, my bid would be counted as the maximum bid instead of theirs, event though it is only a penny higher. As many eBayers use this tactic, it may help to use more random numbers than 0.01GBP, such as 0.44GBP.

Incremental bidding, where you bid up 1GBP or a similar amount every time you’re outbid is pretty useless. You’re much better off making your maximum bid the most you’re willing to pay; eBay will automatically outbid anyone who makes a smaller bid. eBay will only outbid them by the minimum increment, so you won’t end up out of pocket

On another note, it is really worth using eBay’s best offer system. I have used this to purchase cheap mass produced foreign electronics sold in massive quantities on eBay. I managed to save 0.50GBP through making an offer on a piece of hardware which had a buy it now price of 10GBP. Not much, but a difference nonetheless.

Whilst I have given this advice with sterling, one can obviously do the same in any currency.