Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Picasa 3.0: Download Web Albums in Firefox or Opera

Earlier I explained how to download picasa web albums using firefox and Opera in the post http://sandyiit.blogspot.com/2008/01/picasa-download-albums.html

Summarizing:
To do so, just view the source of the page. Do a right click + View Page Source in case of Firefox of press CTRL + F3 in case of opera. Now in the HTML source search for the string picasa://.

Now you will get a statment which looks like:

picasa://downloadfeed/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fback_compat%2Fuser%2Fsandyiit%2Falbumid%2F5152729459149591681%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss%26imgdl%3D1


This is the download url based on the picasa:// protocol. Now how do you use it to download the album. Simple, just open the command window type in:

> c:\Program Files\Picasa2\Picasa2.exe _url_

The _url_ is the picasa:// url which we got above. When you do so, you will picasa launching itself and loading the web album and asking you whether you want to download it or not. Do it and you have the album at your desktop and the work is done :)

But Now Picasa 3.0 (the new look) has changed the page layout and so has the way to get the _url_. Now to get the correct _url_ : you still need to go the page source. In there:
  1. Search for text : _album.picasa =
  2. Copy the text after the equal to sign to notepad.
  3. Find and Replace '\x2F' by '/' (without the single quotes). The initial part of the text would look like
    picasa:\x2F\x2Fdownloadfeed\x2F?url=http%3A%2F
    This needs to be replaced by
     picasa://downloadfeed/url=........

  4. That done, we revert back to the original steps and type in: "c:\Program Files\Picasa2\Picasa2.exe" _url_ at the command prompt and all works as usual.