Sunday, September 30, 2007

How to Leech Pictures from Flickr or Google Images



There are basically two ways to hack these photo services. The traditional and more painful approach is to make a search on Google [or Flickr or Yahoo], wait for the results page to load and then click the individual photos to open them full size and finally save them to your hard drive. Not recommened.

Don't get turned away, there are some very easy-to-use options that let you create an entire catalogue of images from Google or Flickr for offline viewing. Let's look at some of them:

» Google Image Ripper - This online service extracts the full size images [no thumbnails] from Google index and displays them in one page. You can then save the full page with attachments to build your offline gallery of Google Images.

» Flickr Leech - Type in the Flick tag, username or just a short description and this web based free leeching service will extract hundreds of images from Flick on just one page. This service make Flickr browsing a breeze.

» Google Grab - Unlike the previous two services, Googlegrab is a desktop software that leeches full scale images and download them to your local hard disk automatically. Works for PC and Mac. [via Philipp]

Tip for Webmasters and bloggers:

If you like to prevent Google Images from indexing hosted on your website or blog, place the following robots.txt file in your server root:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

To remove all files of a specific file type (for example, to include .jpg but not .gif images), you'd use the following robots.txt entry:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /*.gif$


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