Bulk Image Downloader - 7. BID Advanced Configuration

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7. BID Advanced Configuration

BID User Guide

Click on the “Advanced Configuration” button on the BID Configuration tab to access the BID Advanced Configuration.

Images

BID Advanced Config Images

BID Advanced Configuration - Images

Non thumbnailed image types

Controls which types of image are considered to be “embedded” (see Image Type Filters). Uncheck the image types that you'd like BID to ignore when processing embedded images.

Delete images smaller than

Enable this option to have BID automatically delete small image files after downloading. This is useful to remove banner adverts and other unwanted small image page elements.

Flickr preferred image size

This option only applies when downloading from flickr.com. Select the preferred image size for BID to download. If the size is not available for a particular image, the next biggest available size will be downloaded.

Video

Some video sites have video content available in different formats. Configure the preferred video types for these sites here. If a video format is unavailable BID will download the next best quality format found.

BID Advanced Config Video

BID Advanced Configuration –Video

Browser Integration

BID Browser Integration

BID Advanced Configuration –Browser Integration

This tab allows you to enable or disable certain menu items from your browser's right click context menu.

The “Create BID Sub-Menu” option will create a separate sub menu item in the context menu for the menu items. If not enabled the menu items appear directly in the main right click menu. This option is only applicable to Opera and FireFox.

These options do not apply to the BID Google Chrome extension. Configure the BID Google Chrome extension (if installed) via the Google Chrome Tools->Extensions menu, then clicking on the “Bulk Image Downloader” Options button.

General

BID Advanced Configuration General

BID Advanced Configuration – General

Cache Control

BID caches files automatically when downloading – this allows for broken downloads to be resumed from the point of failure and has other performance benefits. The cache can be configured to be cleared on exit or kept for a specified number of days. Click on the “Clear Cache and Temp Files Now” button to delete all cached files immediately.

Prompt to save batch on exit

If enabled, BID will pop up a warning dialog on closing if there are still files to be downloaded.

Cancel download if free disk space below

BID will automatically cancel a download if disk space drop below the selected value.

Save gallery URL shortcut in download folder

If enabled, BID will create an internet shortcut to the gallery page in the download folder.

Disable Unicode characters in file and folder names

If enabled, BID will replace any Unicode (non ASCII) character with an underscore.

Ignore List, Include List, Redirect Links and JavaScript Sites

When scanning web pages BID uses a special internal “scoring” system to determine which links are thumbnailed images and which are full sized images. All other links types are ignored.

This works very well for the majority of web galleries, but occasionally you may come across a gallery that BID cannot download from, or where incorrect links are identified as thumbnailed image links.

By configuring the “Ignore List”, “Include List”, “Redirect Links” and “JavaScript Sites” settings discussed next, you may be able to successfully download such problem galleries.

Note that some web sites go to extreme lengths to block the use of automated image downloaders such as BID. Because of this it may not always be possible to configure BID to download from such sites. However, if you come across such a problem site please contact us and send us the details. If there's enough demand we can investigate supporting the site as a “special case” in a future release of BID.

BID Advanced Configuration Ignore List

BID Advanced Configuration - Ignore List

Regular Expressions

The Ignore List, Include List and Redirect Links are lists of “regular expressions”, one per line.

A regular expression is a specially formatted text string used for pattern matching.

The following characters have special meanings when used in regular expressions and must be prefixed by a backslash (\) if you wish to use them as literals in your regular expression.

[, \, ^, $, ., |, ?, *, +, (, ), /

^ = start of line
$ = end of line
. = match any character
\x = use literal character x

For a detailed explanation of regular expressions please visit http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

Some examples:

The regular expression test matches any link containing the word “test”, such as “http://website.com/test123/index.htm” or http://example.com/images/test_image.jpg

The regular expression _th\.jpeg$ matches any link that ends with “_th.jpeg”, such as “http://myimagesite.com/thumbs/hotcar_th.jpeg” or “http://anothersite.com/thumbpic_th.jpeg”.

Notice the use of the backslash to indicate a literal dot, and the dollar sign indicating the end of the line.

Simplified Regular Expressions

As most people find regular expressions hard to understand we've added support for what we call “simplified” regular expressions. These are of the form:
<must contain this text> or <!must not contain this text>

The characters within the angle brackets are treated as literals – no backslashes are required to “escape” any characters.

e.g. If we want to match on any URL that contained the string “/index.php?id=” we would use:
</index.php?id=>

These can be combined together as often as required.

e.g. We want to match all links that contain both “/index.php?id” and “gal=1” but do not contain “/advert”:
</index.php?id=><gal=1><!/advert>

A normal regular expression can be combined with these simplified expressions if required.

e.g. We want to match all links that contain both “/index.php?id” and “gal=1”, do not contain “/advert”, and end with “.html”
</index.php?id=><gal=1><!/advert>\.html$

Ignore List

The Ignore list is used by BID to filter out links that may be misidentified as thumbnailed image links, or full sized images. After downloading a page, BID will automatically try to match all the links found against this list of regular expressions. Any matching links are discarded.

This can be useful if you find that BID keeps incorrectly identifying a particular type of link (such as a banner advert) as an image, or if BID keeps downloading the wrong full sized image from a web page. Simply add a regular expression that matches the unwanted links and BID will ignore it.

Include List

If BID finds no images when scanning a web gallery page you can force it detect the images by adding regular expressions that match the full sized image links.

Suppose all the full sized image links look like this:
http://trickywebsite.com/pics/largesize/<random nunber>/

To force BID to detect these as valid full sized image links you would add the following regular expression to the “Include list”:
<trickywebsite.com/pics/largesize/>

This would match any link that contains “trickywebsite.com/pics/largesize”.

Some full sized image pages only display “medium sized” images and have links to pages containing larger or original sized images. To force BID to follow such links add a regular expression matching this link to the include list prefixed with an asterisk (*). This also works for cases where BID does not find the the correct full sized image on the page.

For example, suppose our “full page” link contains a link to the original sized image that looks like:
http://example.com/images/fullsized/(imagename).jpg

We would add the following line to the include list:
*<example.com/images/fullsized/>

Some web sites use non standard methods to generate thumbnails. To help find these thumbnails on a web page add a matching regular expressions prefixed by 2 asterisks (**). For example:
**<thumbnailgenerator.php?id=>

Redirect Links

Many web galleries link the thumbnailed images to redirection “services” that display pop up adverts before redirecting to the full sized image page. BID automatically tries to resolve these redirected links when it finds them so that it can download directly from the original image page.

A nice by product of this redirection resolution is that you can then use the “Export Gallery” function to export a clean, redirection free gallery that can be pasted into forums or web pages.

If you come across a gallery that is redirected through a redirection service that BID is unaware of, simply add a matching regular expression to this list.

For example, suppose all gallery thumbnail links look like this:
http://newultracashimagebucks.org/<random number>

To force BID to resolve these links you would add the line
<newultracashimagebucks.org>
to the list.

JavaScript Sites

Some web sites generate their content dynamically using JavaScript. This may prevent BID from detecting any images when scanning gallery pages of such sites. To force BID to process the JavaScript for such sites add regular expressions that match the web site domain to this list. Note that doing this can greatly slow down page loading and processing.

If the expression matches a full sized image page, downloading can be sped up by prefixing the expression with a single asterisk (*).

Some web sites use unusual scripting methods that require special handling. Prefix the regular expression with “1:” to indicate to BID that special handling is required.
As a general rule, if BID cannot download from a JavaScript site that you've added to the list, try prefixing the regular expression with a “1:” and try again.

Folders

BID Advanced Config Folders

BID Advanced Configuration – Folders

Standard BID folders can be changed here if required. The Queue Folder is used by BID to save a batch file before it is queued to via “Add to Queue” function. The “Retry Batch Folder” is where BID automatically saves batches containing images that failed to download. These files are listed in the Queue Manager and can be re-queued if required. The “Log File Folder” is where BID keeps its log file.

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