I often visit press Web sites that allow you to download a large number of files, some of which are quite large and take a long time to transfer. (No it’s not porn, you dirty-minded pervert!) Saving them one at a time is tedious and time consuming, so I’d like a way to automate it.
Can you recommend a Firefox plugin or other program that will allow me to automatically download and save every file linked from a given page? Offline browsers apparently do this, and I found one (MM3) that did it automatically for every page you visit. That’s more than I need. I just want to be able to tell it: get this page, when I need it.
What OS do you have? I haven’t done this lately, but on Windows XP, you can add a webpage link to C:\windows\Offline Web Pages. Under its properties, there’s a tab where you can tell it how many links deep to include. Set it to 1.
It wouldn’t let me drag a page directly from Firefox to that folder. I had to drag the page to my desktop, then drag that shortcut to the Offline Web Pages folder.
Right click, then select “Synchronize” to get the page, and any links. Or select Properties->Schedule to have it automatically synchronize.
Well, I tried it out. Double clicking on the link in the Offline Web Pages folder didn’t work. Neither did dragging it onto either FireFox or IE. I had to upgrade to the latest IE to get some files from my ISP, and now I can’t even figure out how to try to open a file from within IE anymore.
Eventually, I found I could drag the Offline Web Pages link to a tab in IE, and I could then view the page while not connected to the internet. Presumably, Windows stores the offline web pages somewhere, so if you can find out where that is (it used to be “Temporary Internet Files”, I think) you’d be able to find your files there.
Thanks for the tip, ZenBeam. Using IE, I save the page in question to Favorites, the selected the “Work Offline” option, and various other settings as needed. It even lets you enter a user ID and password if the Web site requires them, which in this case it did. So that was good.
I see that Firefox has a Work Offline feature, too, but it’s just a checkoff, and it doesn’t seem to work the same way as IE’s feature. I haven’t bothered to figure out how it works yet.
Thanks, ErinPuff. I’ll check that out, too, although I’ve done what I needed to do for now.
There’s also a Firefox extension called Scrapbook that I use. It can capture a page, or a highlighted part of a page, and it will follow links and capture them to whatever depth you choose. That way, you would have a copy of the index page and you would navigate through the files using that. You access the captured pages through a menu like the bookmark menu, or a sidebar.
DownloadHelper is also nice. It puts a little pull-down menu next to your location bar, and you can choose which types of media to pull off the page. It then downloads them one at a time; you can change that, but I like it since each file downloads more quickly and it doesn’t hog the bandwidth so much.