Picture Saving Software

atheist · 10-17-2008, 04:02 PM

I'm looking for software that automatically downloads pictures from a server and saves them to a folder.

I have literally thousands of pictures that I need to download, and I'm not about to do it manually.

The URL names go like this:
http://www.site.com/directory/blah[DATE]-[#].png

I need software that checks a date that's given, and downloads all the pictures for that date, saving it in a directory with the date as the name. The number of pictures for each date vary, so it would have to stop by itself when there aren't any more pictures.

Then I need it to go to the next possible date, if that date exists and if not, skip to the next one, et cetera.

Do you guys know any software that does this?

Thanks.

rabbit2345 · 10-17-2008, 05:08 PM

you could probably just write a shell script for that. im not very experienced in this area, but I know you can do something like this:

Code:

for ((  i = 0 ;  i <= 5;  i++  )); do wget `date`-$i; done

you will have to tell date what date format the files are named.
like if your files are blah101508-10.png, you will have to use
date +%m%d%y

this particular loop will go 5 times, just set it to a higher number

run date --help to see a list of what it can output.
you do need the (+) at the beginning though.
other characters are put into the date.

since date +%m%d%y gives you 101708, date +%m/%d/%y will give you 10/17/08

good luck,
rabbit2345

atheist · 10-17-2008, 08:00 PM

Thanks for that. I'm really bad with shell scripting.

However... I need to be able to download every image for a certain date, before moving onto the next date... :S

And how would I actually put the URL around the date in that code? I'm not familiar with the syntaxing for shell scripting.

rabbit2345 · 02-16-2009, 04:01 PM

Well, since this:

Code:

for ((  i = 0 ;  i <= 5;  i++  )); do wget `date`-$i; done

Only downloads for today's pictures, you will need to probably manually enter dates, unless the dates are consecutive, like 10-17-08 then 10-18-08. I'm not very experienced either. The URL would go around like:

Code:

for ((  i = 0 ;  i <= 5;  i++  )); do wget (url)`date`-$i; done

so in the end, it will look like this:

Code:

for ((  i = 0 ;  i <= 5;  i++  )); do wget http://picturesite.com/mypage/pics/`date`-$i.png; done

Don't forget to add extensions, such as .png or .jpg as in the 3rd example.

Sorry for the extremely long delay, my e-mail's been really weird.

H_TeXMeX_H · 02-17-2009, 03:49 AM

Can you please specify the date format exactly as it would appear in your case ? It would help a lot.

Also, I don't think the date program is needed here, even tho it could be used.

AwesomeMachine · 02-17-2009, 05:22 AM

Try curl

atheist · 02-19-2009, 02:33 PM

Thanks for the input guys. Curl works perfectly. Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.