Have you ever come across a web page that has a lot of pictures on it, or perhaps music files (or files of any kind), and you want to download them to your hard drive? Perhaps a friend uploaded a bunch of vacation pictures, or snapshots of the new baby, and you wish there was an easy way to download all of them, as opposed to clicking on each one, one at a time.
Well, there is an easy way – if you’re using Firefox. It’s a slick little extension called DownThemAll, and it’s available from the Firefox Addons Page.
Installing DownThemAll is as simple as clicking on the green “Install Now” button on the extensions page. If you’re using any version of Firefox, from the older 1.5 series all the way up to the newest 3.0 development builds, DownThemAll should install without a hitch. Simply restart the browser and you’re ready to go.
When you find one of those pages (this page, with mp3 files of a Phish concert, is a good example, but you can use whatever page you choose, of course), simply right-click your mouse (or control-click if you have a one-button mouse), and you’ll see a couple options relating to DownThemAll. If you’d like to see your options, choose the one simple called “DownThemAll…” and you’ll be taken to a window that lists all the downloadable items on a particular page.
From here, you can click all the ones you want to download, then start them all at the same time, or you can use the built-in filtering capabilities to help you out. For instance, on the page used as an example, you’ll notice that there seem to be twice as many links as should be necessary for the number of songs in the concert. This is because there are two files available for every song. One is the actual song, while the other will start your media player streaming the song. If you want only the songs that you can download, simply check them off one by one. Or – as mentioned – you can use DownThemAll’s filtering capabilities. Click the blue icon near the bottom of the window (or just click “Additional filters”), and type in whatever you want DownThemAll to filter. In this case, type “download” since that word appears in the description of every downloadable file. Instantly, all the downloadable files are highlighted and checked.
At this point, you’re ready to go. All that’s left to do is select where you want the files to download to (click the blue folder icon and select the spot on your hard drive), and then click either the “Start!” or “Queue!” button. The “Start!” button will begin downloading immediately, while the “Queue!” button simply takes the files you’ve selected and puts them in line, so to speak. They’ll wait there until you start them. This is handy if you want to get a whole bunch of files ready to download all at once. When you’re ready, simply go to the queue window, highlight the files you wish to start downloading, and hit the green “Resume” button, and off you’ll go.
In my experience, DownThemAll is a great download manager. It’s easy to use, makes downloading a ton of things all at once a simple task, and above all, is fast. If you’re looking for a slick, easy-to-use way to simply your downloading experience, give DownThemAll a try. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
