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Grabbing and downloading website images with OWIDIG

OWIDIG is an online image grabber and downloader of website images. I introduced it last month in this article. Since then several more features were added. This article contains detailed review of OWIDIG functionality.

With OWIDIG service you can grab images from any website, view them, filter them, get information about them or download them. You may include or exclude images which are repeated. Moreover, CSS images (located inside style tags, external stylesheets (via link or import) and also inside inline styles) are supported as well. Images can be grabbed from sites with standard HTTP protocol as well as secure HTTPS protocol.

There are two basic modes – the LIST mode and the TABLE mode. In the list mode all images are listed one-by-one, side-by-side. We can hover over them to see more details. We may click on them to open them in a new window in their original dimensions. You can even share them via social networks or email. In the table mode we can see images in two tables – one table for standard HTML images, another one for images inside CSS. By clicking on column headers you can sort listed images according chosen property. The preview size of images in this mode might or might not be limited (by default it is limited to 330 pixels in both width and height).

Another feature is a deep grabbing. You may want to grab images from the whole website including all its subsections. OWIDIG enable users to grab images up to link depth of 10 for sitelinks that have the same domain as the original URL. Of course, the deep grabbing may sometimes take a significant amount of time, if there are many subsections. For grabbing from single URL there is one more option to grab images generated with JavaScript. This can be used when images aren’t in the original source code, but are in the code generated with JavaScript.

OWIDIG provides lots of filtering options to grab just those images you really want to grab. You can choose whether to include both standard and CSS images, or only ones of them. You can filter images by their dimensions, type, URL, filename and ordinal number. You can set user-agent, proxy, referrer and cookies to influence returned grabbed image content.

And finally we come to downloading of images. You can just list all images in a new window and then use saving capabilities of browser to save them. You may also use an applet. This applets requires user approval as it writes data – the images – to your hard drive. Using this applet you can set filenames and paths of downloaded images. In some browsers (Opera and Firefox support, partial Chrome support – for smaller archives) you can also create ZIP archive from images (you can set filenames of zipped images as well).

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