As you may have noticed I am always on the lookout for art to use in RPGs. Beyond that, I’m always on the lookout for art that I enjoy in general. I have a folder on my harddrive containing over 3GBs of images solely for RPGs, and that is only a single folder of many that I have for categorizing artwork I’ve collected on my computer.

I probably ought to be ashamed to admit that the majority of this I’ve downloaded by hand — Browsing through galleries, looking at images and saving the ones I like. Only recently have I started using a download manager, and I’m amazed at how much easier it is to handle downloading large batches of files. I did a little research before I decided upon a download manager and Flashget (with its FireFox plugin, Flashgot) was the most highly recommended of all of them. As I was pleased to learn the program was made freely available in 2006 and is no longer ad-supported.

I downloaded the program, it seemed a bit complex but I figured I’d grow into it. I don’t really understand their format for Regular Expressions, which seems to only allow you to use wildcards to represent a single character. This seems pretty counter-intuitive, as if I’m downloading images from “/images/” on some server and I’m looking to download everything in that folder, chances are I’m not going to know how many characters are in filename. Instead of being able to configure the program to download /images/*.jpg, it seems like I’d have to find another way to download the contents of the image directory.

Not ideal, but fair enough. I first gave it a try with my efforts to download collections of tarot cards. It was a stunning failure. The website in question, Multiply.com, seems to require a certain “code” to display the original (full-size) image. I could access the thumbnails easily enough, but since each of the original images was located in a directory similar to “/orig/##_NameofCard.jpg?id=SequenceofNumbersandLetters” and since I am not sure how to use Flashgot’s seemingly hamstrung implementation of regular expressions, the task of setting up the program to download any files fitting the paradigm of “/orig/*.jpg?id=*” was put to a complete stop. After trying various different approaches over the course of about 3 days I finally gave up and decided to download my favorite five sets manually.

After that one failure I tried a different challenge for FlashGet, one that I suspected would be easier. Photo-storage sites most likely actively try to discourage downloading from albums. What about a more traditional website-with-artwork site? Could I manage to get FlashGet to work there?

The quarry was Wizards.com, in particular their publicly-available digitized collections of artwork from D&D books. I am not a huge fan of the D&D 3.X artwork style, but let’s face it: You’re rarely going to get such a large and versatile collection of artwork. It’s too big to pass up. But downloading each image individually, especially when I don’t care about a lot of the images, is just too much to do by hand. I gave FlashGot a shot at it… With excellent results. Within about half an hour of off-and-on downloading while browsing other sites and coding I’d collected all of the artwork from all books Wizards has published in 2006, and with only a minimal of effort also collected the artwork for everything else up to 2001.

Simple, easy. Finally, after years of coveting, I have the entire collection of artwork. Now to put FlashGot to use elsewhere…