The Pixiv website is not only available in Japanese, but also in English, Chinese and a handful of other languages. While it is possible to browser the art collection without an account, only an account opens up the full functionality of the online community.

Registered users can upload and manage their artwork online, comment on illustrations by other artists or use the search feature and the rating system.

Pixiv Images can be downloaded with a right-click on the image. The Pixiv Tool for Firefox has been created to give active Pixiv users a tool at hand to download illustrations automatically. It furthermore adds other improvements or feature additions to the site.

Your first step after installation should be the options of the add-on.

You can enable automatic downloads of Pixiv images the following way. Place a checkmark in the Download the illustration when you give it a score rating this number or beyond and select a rating from the pulldown menu. Whenever you rate an image with at least the selected rating, a download is automatically initiated. A save dialog is shown by default, if you do not want that remove the checkmark from the Use save dialog when downloading illustration preference.

You also need to specify a download directory for the illustrations that you download. Additional download related options are available in the first configuration tab. The program saves a download history to avoid downloading duplicates by displaying already downloaded on the Pixiv website.

The Filename tab defines how images are named when they are saved to the computer. This is an automated process that uses variables. It is possible to use titles, artists, member ids or date and time based variables.

The Pixiv Tool add-on ships with a button that you can place in one of Firefox’s toolbars. A click on the button downloads the currently active image automatically.

Firefox users can download and install the Pixiv add-on from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The Image Collector is a free software for Windows that works without a browser. It currently supports five different Internet sites where images are posted and uploaded to. The five sites in question are divided into a teen group made up of 4Chan and Deviantart, and an All group with the three image hosting websites Imgur, Photobucket and Picasa.

A double-click on one of the supported services displays recent photos as thumbnails in the program interface. A right-click on an image host displays categories that are available on the site. For 4Chan, that’s every group available on site but the 18+ groups.

A double-click displays the image in full size on the screen, a right-click a context menu with options to download all images that are currently on screen. For that, you should define categories first. This is done by pressing F3 to open the categories manager.

Here you can configure categories and link each category to a folder on your system. Images can then be downloaded into a category by selecting the category with a left-click, a right-click on a photo and the selection of Download All from the context menu.

I do have a few issues with the program. It first does not seem to be possible to download individual photos, it seems to be all or nothing. More pressing than that is that there is no search to find images that you are looking for. A search coupled with potent filters like image resolution would make the software that much more usable.

There is also a premium version available which adds other image hosting sites to the program. Windows users can download The Image Collector from the developer website. Please note that the program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Its core feature is the ability to download multiple images from a web page at once. It is only able to scan images that are posted on a page, it will not include linked images in the downloads. That’s a serious disadvantage over the two previously reviewed image downloaders.

Still, its simplicity may be exactly what some users ware looking for. The extension does not confuse you with pages full of settings and if-then-else options.

You can start downloading images in two easy steps. Right-click on a page with images and select the extensions’ context menu entry Pick Images.

This opens a new window with filters on top, a thumbnail preview of all matching images and save options at the bottom.

You can use the filters at the top to limit the thumbnail display to images that exceed a specific file size, and minimum width and height. It is furthermore possible to enable or disable images by file type, with jpeg, bmp, png and gif available for selection. A click on Filter applies the new image filtering settings to the preview area. All images on the page that match the filters are displayed as thumbnails. Additional information, like each images’ resolution, file size and file name are displayed as well.

The View button on top can be used to change the thumbnail display from small to medium or large.

All images are selected for download by default. Checkboxes are available to block some images from being downloaded.

You need to specific a download path for the images before you can use the Save button to save all selected images automatically to the local system. Image Picker creates a folder from the page name automatically in which all images are stored. The extension will use the Firefox cache first if images are stored in the cache to save bandwidth and speed up the downloading.

The Image Picker extension works well on websites and pages that display full sized images. The developer should consider adding an option to download linked images as well with the extension.

Firefox users can download Image Picker from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

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.

The program uses tabs for the supported services with the presented options differing largely depending on the choice made here. Google Images can be searched by entering a search string, the desired number of results, the size of the images (either custom or pre-configured), the image offset and if adult content should be included in the results.

Media Spider will display a save file window which needs to be used to pick the location for the images that are downloaded during the operation.

The image search on Deviant Art uses slightly different parameters. It is here for instance possible to select a specific site category (for instance wallpapers), the sorting method and a username and password.

The 4Chan image downloader finally works by selecting one of the available categories of the popular bulletin board. Media Spider will start downloading images from that 4Chan board automatically once the selection has been made. It is not clear if all images of a board are downloaded or if the program sets a limit as there is no option to set the number of images to download from 4Chan. It looks as if all are downloaded though.

The program remembers the directory the last images were saved to which saves some time during a session. The images are all saved in the root directory of the folder selected. That can be a problem if lots of images are downloaded.

Media Spider is a handy program for users who want to download lots of images from at least one of the supported websites. The program is portable and Open Source. It can be downloaded from its Sourceforge project website. (via ToThePC)

The image downloader will then display a project wizard that allows the user to configure the image download. It is here for example possible to set the local download directory, the internal and external scan depth and image filters so that images below a certain size or resolution are ignored in the downloads.

Neo Downloader Lite ships with several sample projects that can be used to test the functionality of the program. The lite version does come with several restrictions like only being able to download jpg files or a maximum of two open connections at the same time. It should however be sufficient for most users even though the downloads will take a bit longer than in the paid version.

Neo Downloader supports four different download modes. It is possible to download single or multiple galleries, all pictures from the entire website or images from so called TGP sites. The image download software can be downloaded at the developer’s website. Users who want more control over the downloads might want to check out the alternative Httrack instead which is slightly more complicated to use.

Open Image is a portable software program that requires barely any configuration. Pictures can be downloaded by creating a new download task in the program’s interface.

Picture downloads can be instantly started by adding a website url in the Page field. It is furthermore possible to change the download folder and set minimum and maximum file sizes as well as allowed file types to only download pictures that are not filtered out by the rules.

A few additional options are available in the Settings menu like renaming images with sequence numbers, emptying the download folder before starting the picture download or opening the download page in the default web browser

Open Image is a good alternative for downloading pictures from single web pages that contain many pictures. A good alternative for download pictures from multiple pages is the website ripper HTTrack.

A click on a preview thumbnail will open a preview window containing additional information like size, title or format of the selected image. Size buttons on the bottom will load the image in different sizes. These size buttons are automatically adjusted depending on the original size of the image. The same toolbar contains buttons to save the image to the local computer, view it in the original context (which will open the image in the default web browser), set it as the desktop background, copy or share it.

Ginipic is an excellent image search engine that can be used to search for images on multiple image search engines including some of the best places to download wallpapers like Deviant Art or Flickr. The application is a bit heavy on the resource usage but since it does not have to be running all the time in the background it does not matter that much.

Bilder Herunterlader is such a tool. The name is German and stands for Image Downloader (don’t worry, the interface is available in English and German). The tool is a Java application which means that it can be run not only on Windows computers but also on those running Linux. A Firefox extension is available to make it even more comfortable for Firefox users.

About 70 image hosts are already configured in the image downloader which comes with the options to configure additional hosts. The best case scenario is that you right-click a page full of thumbnails and select the Load Images With BH option in Firefox. A download selection window will pop up which can be used to deselect images that should not be downloaded and to pick the right folder for the images.

Everything has been designed to be as easy as possible. It takes just one click to add all images to the download queue of the application. Image names can be recognized automatically as well.

Not all image hosting sites are supported in the default installation and some are not configured to download the original images right away when right-clicking a page full of thumbnails. This can be added for most image hosting sites in the program’s options. It is furthermore possible to edit existing rules so that the links to the full sized images are recognized by the software application.

The best way to get an understanding of rule creation is to read the tutorial on the developers homepage and to look at a few existing rules.

There are two possible scenarios:

• It is possible to discover the url of the full sized image from the thumbnail url
• The url to the full image can be discovered by parsing the html source code

Both methods make use of regular expressions and it might be good to read up on regular expressions first to have a firm understanding of the concept.

Bilder Herunterlader provides sophisticated and advanced means to download images from image hosting sites. It should work on most image hosting sites and can be really helpful if you regularly download images from image hosts.

The minimum resolution can be changed to whatever values you deem appropriate.  Whenever you visit a page with images you can use the right-click option to batch download (all) images on that website to a location on your hard drive that you can specify afterwards. The Batch Downloader offers more than that though. You can specify a base url and use wildcards to download all images that are connected to the base url.

Some websites use formats that are not immediately recognized by batch downloader. This is mostly the case when a scripting language such as php is used to display images. You need to create a gallery using the batch downloader extension first and download the pictures using the normal batch download images option from the right-click menu afterwards.

An alternative to the manual process is using a freeware application like googlegrab which automatically saves the full size images to a newly created folder that is named after the search terms. The program is pretty straight forward. Enter a search term and click search. Googlegrab does everything else. It creates a folder, saves all images to that folder.

You can set some options as well. First, you can limit the downloads to x pictures, the default is 1000. Then you can opt ot download only pictures of a certain size, you can turn downloads for five sizes on or off. (XXL, XL, L, M and S). Then you can turn off child save searches which is probably a good idea and see a preview of the current image.

Googlegrab is available for PC and Mac, great tool.