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.

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 free portable software Mediaspider has been designed as a bulk image downloader for those three locations on the Internet.

The program window separates the three sites into three tabs, so that users can configure the search and download parameters separately for each of them.

These parameters differ slightly. Only a channel can be selected for 4Chan. The other two sites offer more parameters. This includes a search string, number of returned results, size options and option to skip the first x images. DeviantArt searches seem to require a registered account while the other two do not.

Media Spider displays all images that it downloads in a preview window on the screen. This preview window has the same size as the images that are downloaded, but stays in the background all the time to avoid conflicts with other open windows the user is working with. Be aware that the downloader will download all images of a 4chan forum to the local system.

The program lacks a few options, like an image size limit, proxy settings or a download limit for 4chan. The program downloads hundreds of images from 4chan without interruption, as there are currently no options to limit downloads from the location.

Still, MediaSpider does a good job at downloading images in bulk from Google, Deviantart and 4chan. Great for users who download lots of images from at least one of the supported websites, and hoarders.

The name of the application is confusing. In the software is is MediaSpider, on the developer homepage it is MediaArachnid. The portable Open Source application is compatible with most 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. (via TechnixUpdate)

Bulk Image Downloader will automatically download the page, scan it for media references and add those found to the queue. This process works with most websites out there be it Flickr (full image download support), Youtube, Facebook photo galleries, picture posting blogs or Vbulletin forums.

The image downloader works regardless of the way the images are posted or the software that is used to power the website. One of the interesting features is that Bulk Image Downloader can recognize many so called image file hosts that are used to host the full versions of the images and photos.

Most image downloaders will download the thumbnail images only if pointed at the website containing those thumbnails. Bulk Image Downloader will however calculate the address of the full image from the information provided by the thumbnail and add that real image to the download queue instead of the thumbnail even if the target website is an html page and not the image.

Some of the image hosts that are supported are Imagevenue, Imagefap, Imageshack, Megaupload or Photobucket.

Even better is the fact that the program provides access to an advanced configuration that allows experienced users to add their own regular expressions to add new file hosts or edit existing ones.

The advanced configuration does contain general configuration settings besides the ability to maintain an ignore list, include list, redirect list and JavaScript sites with regular expressions.

It is here that users can add or remove the program’s web browser integration, cache settings, automatic deletion of images below a certain file size and program folders for the queue, retry batch folder and log file.

The standard configuration settings are directly accessible in the second tab of the program. It can be used to change the number of download threads, web browser integration, from which browser cookies should be loaded (for sites requiring authentication), if downloads should be resumed and after how many retries the individual downloads and page downloads should be stopped.

Images that are recognized by Bulk Image Downloader can be displayed as text links or small, medium or large thumbnails before downloading the full sized pictures. This is an excellent opportunity to check the images before they are downloaded which can for instance be used to remove selected ones from the download queue.

One of the most powerful features of Bulk Image Downloader has been added to the beta of Bulk Image Downloader 3. The program now supports page ranges in the url. Lets say you encounter a website or forum that contains lots of pages that each contain images, e.g. www.example.com/page1/, www.example.com/page10/ and so on.

Bulk Image Downloader 3 supports brackets to download all pages and photos from those pages. To download the pages 1 to 10 from the above website one would simply add the url www.example.com/page[1-10]/ to the address list in the image downloader.

Each page will be downloaded and processed individually by Bulk Image Downloader and every image or video found will be added to the download queue.

Bulk Image Downloader offers web browser integration for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome (in the latest beta). If the option is enabled a Bid right-click submenu becomes available that can be used to send the active page to the image downloader. Another option that has been recently added is the ability to drag and drop pages into the program’s interface. Cookies from that browser will be used if those options are used.

Verdict

Bulk Image Downloader is an incredible program. It works out of the box and the developer’s are making sure that it stays that way. It is definitely one of the easiest and most convenient image downloaders – if not the easiest and most convenient – that is currently available on the Internet.

New features are added all the time and the devs are very responsive to customer suggestions.

Christmas Giveaway

We have ten licenses of this awesome program. If you want one leave a comment and let us know why you would like to have it.

Raju is giving away licenses for Axialis Iconworkshop Professional today, make sure you check it out.

http://techpp.com/2009/12/14/techpp-mega-christmas-giveaway-axialis-iconworkshop-professional/

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.

The experimental add-on is a bare-bone add-on that currently comes without any means to modify settings. It adds a new icon to the Firefox status bar after installation which, when clicked on, will ask the user to pick a directory where the images from the active website should be saved to.

It will then start to download all images that are displayed on the website. It will also process all images that are linked from the active website. This means that it can download images from pages where the images are displayed as thumbnails with the original sizes linked from those thumbnails. It fails however if the links are html pages that contain the original image (like Flickr handles it for example).

The add-on works extremely well if the original images are linked on the active page. It does fail on the other hand if that is not the case. It will for instance download only thumbnail images at Flickr but the original images at Google Images search. It will also always download all images which includes thumbnail images and other images used on the website.

The add-on needs settings where the user can change this behavior. It would for instance make sense to add a size and file type filter to the program so that small images and those of a certain type are not downloaded automatically. Firefox users who want to try out the batch image downloader can visit the add-on’s profile page at the Mozilla Firefox website to download and install it.

Update: The Batch Image Downloader is no longer available for download. Alternatives are the extensions BatchDownload or Bazzacuda Image Saver Plus.