Downloading images in Site Explorer! Help please!!!!

**Dubiousfella** · 10-21-2009, 06:40 PM

I am trying to download images from this link:

If you click the small magnifying glass icon on the left of the color band in the "Item" column, it goes to a (page?) with an image of the paint swatch. It's a large image.

I have tried to download this through the Site Explorer, but have had no luck. Inevitably what gets downloaded are html pages. I just want the paint swatch ONLY, nothing else.

How do I do this? I would like to download ALL the color swatches, so PLEASE tell me how, in some detail. Help will be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks.

**Brent** · 10-22-2009, 08:29 AM

I have taken a look at the URL you provided and listed the steps to download the swatch color images below:

1. Go to tools menu and select options
2. Navigate to the HTTP settings (under connections)
3. Uncheck the option "Use cookies to assist downloading files from web servers"
4. Press OK to close the options dialog

5. Add a new download job
6. Enter the url you mentioned in the previous post
7. Change the 'action' of the download job to "Download Site Files"
8. Change the 'link depth' to 2
9. Change the 'File types' to be downloaded to Image Files
10. Press OK.

This will walk the links in the site and download all the image files. You should find your swatch images in the folder under 'items\006\20\swatches'

When finished downloading this job you should turn the option to use cookies to assist downloading back on.

**Dubiousfella** · 10-22-2009, 09:33 PM

Thanks for replying and giving me the solution to the problem so quickly.

I did everything you said, and eventually got the swatches, but not without getting about 4500 more files that I didn't need. Here's what happened:

After it began the download, four (4) folders were created in a few minutes by the downloading processes. They were 1) http--cdn.dickblick.com, 2) http--events.dickblick.com, 3) https--www.dickblick.com, and 4) styles.

Since I didn't find the "swatches" folder easily even after thoroughly expanding each created folder, I performed a search with the word "swatches", and found that in the "items" sub-folder of folder 1. It was nestled waaay inside other sub folders, making it hard to find at first.

I stopped the entire downloading process after I saw more than 4500 files were already downloaded, and more were streaming-in. I caught-on to what was happening when I saw file names of items that were...well, practically the entire dickblick website product images!!!

My questions are:

1) Can we not specify that I want to download filenames that have the word "swatches" ONLY, after specifying "image" files that I did already? This would eliminate a LOT of clutter and thousands of other image files that were downloaded this time, needlessly.

2) What exactly does designating "2 levels" do? How about "1 level", so that, again, less irrelevant images are downloaded?

3) The swatches came in two sizes, a thumbnail size, and the original large size. Can we somehow specify that only the large size be downloaded?

If I hadn't stopped the processes when I noticed irrelevant and practically ALL the dickblick site images (up to 2 levels of course, I understand that!) were being downloaded, the downloading process would've gone on for, perhaps...hours, I suppose. I was already running out of space on my drive with whatever had come in already.

Please help me with the questions above.

Thanks.

**Dubiousfella** · 10-22-2009, 09:39 PM

And oh...forgot to ask...

How do I download that entire COLOR column 'color band' too? Just the band and it's color name text that appears on the bands, all of them.

Thanks.

**Brent** · 10-23-2009, 03:45 PM

Hi,

Currently with a site job we don't have the ability to only download based on a pattern in the url, for example to say to the job 'only download urls that contain the text 'swatch''. You are right, this would be a handy feature and stop a lot of useless downloading on other images.

We plan on putting this into a future version.

Yes, I believe that 1 level link depth would have worked. It means that links will be followed for X number of times, so 1 should be enough as the image you were after is on the page that links to the site job url.

There is an option to ignore files if they are smaller in file size, this may help you to weed out the files you don't want, but it can be a bit of guess work. This option is in the advanced file filter settings for a site job.

The color column on the url you mentioned is not an image, but a html table. If you view the source of the page and search for one of the names of the colors you will see the html table code. Therefore it doesn't make sense to 'download' this as it is not an image.