Picasa: Download Web Albums in Firefox or Opera

Update of this post taking care of new Picasa release is explained at http://sandyiit.blogspot.com/2008/09/picasa-30-download-web-albums-in.html

I am slowly turning into a google consumer. When I first ventured into the world wide web, it was dominated by Yahoo. I used Yahoo search and later moved to google search. I used Yahoo mail which I later switched to gmail. I user Yahoo messenger and later switched to GTalk. I used Yahoo pics and also Flickr. I liked flickr but its 200 pics limit was something which irritated me. So when I saw picasa giving a Gig of space for my pics I moved to it. So I am moving out of Yahoo's fold to Google's. Its not that Yahoo is bad but they make things heavy and bloated. Google keeps it simple and tidy which I like and hence so many changes.

Photos is one service where I still love flickr compared to picasa but I still use picasa because of it 1 Gig space and also its desktop application which lets you do quite a lot of things. Still it has its impairments. In my last post I talked about caption, now its time for downloading whole web albums present in picasa web.

Picasa has its own protocol picasa:// to download and upload pictures from desktop to the web. Ideally when you install picasa on your desktop, this protocol should get registered to your web browser which should tell the browser that if such a link appears what to do which is to launch picasa. Sadly only IE seems to understand it and work as expected. Neither Firefox nor Opera seems to understand the protocol and hence it shows a "Download Picasa" link
in the left navigation menu when Picasa is already installed on the desktop. Now how can we
download the whole album?

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 :)