Last night I was trying to grab all the photos off my friend’s fotki.com account. I couldn’t find any link to download a whole album easily. I fired up wget with some simple options and that failed. The reason? I was trying to grab the original images (basically the link ‘Get Original Uploaded Photo’ on this page for example).
If you view the source you’ll see that the link is actually generated by javascript:
document.write('<br><a class=text3 href="');
document.write('http://images111.fotki.com/v750/fileaZ5N/f145a/4/41967/110006/AestheticBalllet.jpg');
document.write('" mce_href="');
document.write('http://images111.fotki.com/v750/fileaZ5N/f145a/4/41967/110006/AestheticBalllet.jpg');
document.write('">Get Original Uploaded Photo</a>');
After realizing this, I wrote a quick php script to grab all the images. Because of this, I’m never using fotki. I know why they make it difficult for you to do such a thing (bandwidth expenses, etc) but in todays world of mediafire.coms and unlimited email storage there’s little reason to do it. Other than to piss me off and force me to resort to coding.
December 6th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Hi Wayne, sorry to be pissing you off
since we are not a Silicon Valley VC-funded, money-burning company and we have millions of users, we have to put some limits to the us - but we hope to soon remove it in order to make advanced users like you happy with Fotki.
What you can do is go to http://ftp.fotki.com and login into account and grab any whole albums or even folders of your friends photos - what could be easier? no need to write scripts and such.
I hope that would work?
Cheers,
igor
Fotki
December 6th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
@Igor, I did end up doing that (luckily it was a close friend :)). I would imagine giving ftp access to users causes more of a headache than anything else though