; How to download and install picasa 3.8 for Free | Google Operating System News

Sunday 24 July 2011

How to download and install picasa 3.8 for Free

How to download and install picasa 3.8 for Free

Web Albums Without Installing Picasa Download Picasa

Note: this post initially linked to a Greasemonkey script that no longer works, but it now offers an easier solution suggested in the comments.

Unlike other photo sharing sites, Picasa Web Albums offers a way to download an entire album, but that requires Picasa 2.5 or later. If you don't want to install the application or you use Mac or Linux, there are other ways to download a photo album.

For Firefox, you can use DownThemAll, probably the best download manager add-on. After installing the extension and restarting the browser, go to the album you want to download, click on the "RSS" link from the sidebar and you'll get the album's feed. Right-click on the page, select DownThemAll/DownThemAll in the contextual menu, expand the Filters section and check "Images". Don't forget to enter the folder where you want to save the photos.

Update: Read the comments to find a lot of interesting ways to download albums from Picasa Web.

7 comments:

  1. Pervaiz

    So instead of installing 1 piece of software all you have to do is install 2 packages, restart Firefox, manually add some options to a download dialog box and Presto!, you've downloaded an album without all the fuss.

    Brilliant!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Let's see:
    @Bill: Well, Greasemonkey and DownThemAll are very useful add-ons (they're probably in the top 10 of the best Firefox extensions). They also work cross-platform. What I was trying to say is that Google should let you choose how you want to download the photos and not force you to install an application (even if Picasa is free and easy to use).

    @Tomer Gabel: It's a command line tool, so it would be nice to have an interface closely integrated with the browser.

    @Anonymous: No, Picasa for Linux doesn't support Picasa Web Albums (it was more like an experiment).

    @Matt: Fireuploader is great to upload/download photos from your account, but you can't use it download other public albums.

    @Alex: That's useful if you want to embed thumbnails in a page, not to download the original photos.

    I think a better idea would be to create a service that uses the API and lets you download everything as a ZIP.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very good work Bradley! But I have one question - it seems to not download the full resolution versions of the pictures (3008x2000 according to Picasa becomes 1600x1064), am I doing something wrong?!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great tool Bradley! I have also been writing a little program, using Python Picasa API, with a simple gtk GUI interface. At the moment it let you download albums from a given user with some options. I am preparing a new and improved release in the next days :)
    You can take a look to it too!
    Check PycasaDownload project
    It is nice to know there are alternatives to get photos from Picasa!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Question for BRAD BEACH, regarding the WebAlbum Assistant home:

    This is a great software and exactly what I have been looking for for a long time.

    I have installed it yesterday, but once I want to download a picture I get the following error message:

    "Disk I/O Error"... and then something about me not having the privileges to write on this disk. Of course, the disk is my Desktop and I have full privileges.

    Any clue how to fix this please ?

    Thanks,

    Walter

    ReplyDelete
  6. To BB.
    I have seemingly installed correctly your interface on my mac, however I get stuck in the downloading part.
    Just after I have copied a picasa URL into the appropriate case and clicked on download, it opens a new window first saying "Copying thumbnails" and then, once I have selected which pictures to copy, I click on download. It's been a few minutes that it says "Downloading" but nothing happens, it's still at picture 1 of 81...
    Any hint would help! Thanks for the help and for the application (once I make it work...)

    ReplyDelete
  7. It depends on your internet connection and the size of the photo you are trying to download. The program downloads over port 80 (The same as web traffic) so if you can view the web there is no port error. If you are on a slow connection try simply waiting for a while. I didn't program a speed indicator, or how far along it is on the current photo. If you're not getting a network error, or a disk IO error, then it is indeed downloading. Also try checking the download directory while the program is downloading. View the file properties of the incomplete download. Take note of the size of the file. After a little while go back and check it again to see if it has grown larger. I'm working on a new version right now that will give an indication of how far along the download process is for each picture.

    Hope this helps,
    Bradley Beach

    ReplyDelete