Dropping Drop.io
I was recently tasked with the mundane job of downloading ~40 images from a Drop.IO hosted album. Drop.io is one of the several providers of online file swaping, similar in style to the Dropbox service
What irked me about Drop.io is that there was no immediately apparent way to download the full size versions of the pictures quickly. To download even a single picture took far more clicks than I was willing to endure. Downloading the images I needed was akin to a hardcore session of Diablo 2. My mouse may never recover. Web 2.0 AJAX-y interfaces have their place, but I want efficiency.
To that end I dug through all of their javascript and was able to uncover how I could automate getting access to the full URL for each image (not an easy task by any means through the normal UI). I spent an hour or two brushing off my Javascript skills and learning how to write a Greasemonkey user script for Firefox. Greasemonkey is an extension that allows you to install hunks of javascript that automatically load for specific sites to modify them client-side. (Honestly it’s worth installing the extension just to get the cute little monkey icon in your bottom status bar). My script automatically links all of the thumbnail images in an album to their full downloads.
It was fun writing Javascript after spending the past semester trying to adapt myself to functional programming in LISP and Clojure. Once you forget that the syntax is very C-like and program it in a functional & dynamic style Javascript can be a lot of fun. Greasemonkey was also surprisingly easy to pick up in an afternoon. No complex API’s to learn or anything; it’s practically plain JS all the way through.
It’s worth noting that if you have the fantastic Down Them All firefox extension installed you will be able to download the entire album’s full size images in one click using the custom filename pattern: */original_content
I’ve only tested this script using Firefox 3.5.6 with Greasemonkey 0.8.2 so there may be dragons. The Greasemonkey website has instructions on how to install scripts Follow those and browse to a Drop.io album of your choice. The rest happens automatically.
Enjoy!
Download dropio_pic_grab.user.js
- Dan
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