How to download albums on photobucket

All Links are to free software that has no viruses and are useful. I get nothing for you downloading these. All images can be clicked on, opening in a new tab to enlarge it.

This is still working as of August 31, 2020. If you are having problems, please contact me or leave a comment. I still have my account so I can keep this up to date and working without anyone having to shell out money for what is theirs. I’m really not too busy to help you all out when needed.

Another thing to try if you are having trouble getting usable links is the extension Photobucket Hotlink Fix. Extension to fix the hotlinking issue in Photobucket, It’s not needed to pay with this extension, the images will continue loading. It is a free extension available for Chrome and all Chrome built browsers like Brave.

First thing you’ll need to know is that it takes time. But probably not the almost year it took for me trying to figure out a way that actually WORKS.

I was notified on June 3, 2020 that Photobucket has again made changes and they’ve put the way I tell you here behind a paywall. While that is true, there is still a work around so keep reading!

I have had a Photobucket account since August 4, 2004 to be exact. 16 years. Granted the last few I haven’t used it as much as I used to back in my LiveJournal days. Nonetheless I have 3652 photos in various folders on my account. Which is not only now over their new free limit, but apparently as of March 16, 2020 my account no longer includes hosting. This last month I have been getting emails saying my account is over it’s hosting limit and I guess because I didn’t go and buy a package from them, they’ve decided to not allow hosting for my account.

No problem Photobucket. I don’t care as I use Flickr now anyway. And I think the only thing still connected to my Photobucket is my LiveJournal accounts and a few forums.

But this got me looking again for a way to get all those photos onto my computer somewhat easily. A problem I’ve been looking to solve for quite a while now, perhaps almost a year. All I found was out of date rubbish that doesn’t work because Photobucket changed their platform to one that is really unfriendly. Or ways that should work, but for some reason I am not understanding that finial step well enough for it to actually work – and later finding out that method only works for MACs not PCs which isn’t mentioned ANYWHERE in the bloody article.

I found that last bit by reading the comments. Like thousands of comments. It was seriously buried and no one ever mentioned it when people were saying “This isn’t working for me! What am I doing wrong?” The answer was A- you’re on a PC and the solution is a MAC one – OR B – actually you’re trying to use the bash on a Windows 10 PC which doesn’t exactly work out of the box – meaning you need to do some settings tweeking for it to work – and trying to figure THAT out?

Shit, I have been using computers for most of my life and some of the stuff people are suggesting is either bullshit or is going so far over my head, 80’s me would miss it. Yeah I had big bangs in the 80s/90s almost ever female did!

But the answer is JDownloader2. Just download the application and use it to get your photos. Seriously. It was maybe an hour for me to get all the links loaded into the application and then another 30 minutes to an hour for all the photos to be downloaded into the folder of my choosing.

I had of course thanks to a guide I was trying to follow previously, collected all of my photos links, which actually didn’t take too long, despite the 3652 photos. Let me walk you through that little process as I am not familiar enough with JDownloader to offer other methods. Perhaps someone would be too kind to comment other methods that can be used (probably quicker and easier than the one I’m about to share) with JDownloader.

Getting Photo Links

Head over and log into your Photobucket account. You can easily bypass any upgrade urges by clicking on the Photobucket logo in the upper left. Click on a folder in your Library. For this example, I’m just going to use my main folder, but as you can see from the screenshot, I have just a few folders.

When you are in the folder, click on the check mark in the lower right corner of any photo in this folder.

Next, go to the top of the page and click on that Select All button. It will select every photo in that folder without you having to go through each page. If there are photos you don’t want to keep, you may wish to go through and delete them from your Photobucket before doing this.

Once the Select All button turns into the Deselect All button, you know you’re ready for the next step. And for me right now, that’s coffee…..

You should now see on the bottom a number. That’s how many photos that are currently selected. This normally will match how many photos you have in that folder. Which is listed in parentheses by the folder name in the left hand list.

Now click on the word Links located next to the number of images selected. If you are clicking on it and nothing happens, look for a floating X along the bottom.

You may have to move the mouse for it to show, but close it and you’ll be able to click on Links. No idea what it is as my AD blocker is off for this site (Photobucket makes you turn it off or buy a package) but it is in the way and took me a few minutes of refreshing and moving my mouse along the bottom of the screen until I saw that and clicked it away. Asshats.

A screen will pop up and you want to click in the Direct box and copy those links. Open a text editor like Notepad ++ and paste the links into that.

Here is where it’s changed. While you still get the Copy Links pop up, it now looks like this:

BUT! You see not all of the boxes have that ‘Please upgrade to access’ bullshit? Yeah, click on one and then jump over to Notepad++ and Ctrl + V that shit. You get what looks a bit like this (it’ll depend on which box you click in) and may be scary for some:

Yeah, but look. All the links ARE RIGHT THERE. They are just nestled into code. CODE THAT JDOWNLOADER 2 WILL IGNORE. Just copy the code, then continue on with this tutorial.

Now I have been informed that the Thumbnail code is all that is popping up for some as free, and if that is the case, JDownloader will grab the thumbnails and not the original image, which is denoted by ‘th’ in front of the image name. You can work around this, but it will take more work on your end. Sorry. But this is what you need to do.

That is the raw code as it looks when you put it into your text application. If you look at it closely you see that there are two urls that are pretty identical for each image, but the second one has a different beginning: It shows a https://oimg instead of the standard https://smg. And the first url ends in html which is why JDownloader isn’t picking up the original image. Easiest thing to do is to highlight the .html, go into the Search menu and choose ‘Find’. You should have a few tabs in the pop up.

You see that Notepad++ automatically put in the part I had copied. Click on the Replace tab.

Make sure there is nothing in the Replace with section. Click in it and hit backspace until the cursor won’t go any further to the left. Then hit Replace All. This will remove the .html – make sure you have the period in there!

Now if you don’t want the thumbnails as well as the original sized image go through the same steps as you did to change .html to nothing, and simply put th_ in the ‘Find What’ section and then make sure there is absolutely nothing in the ‘Replace with’ section. Click into the Replace with section and hit backspace until it won’t go any further to the left.

Nice try Photobucket. But you may have to work quickly because I am sure they’ll hide everything behind a paywall. And if they do, it may be worth the $4 they charge a month just to get the photos. Small price to tell them to kiss your ass.

You will have to repeat these steps for each and every folder you have until you have links for every photo you want to download. Save the file, where ever and by any name you wish.

Using JDownloader

Now open up JDownloader. Click in that Notepad file and hit CTRL+A and then CTRL+C and JDownloader will automatically start imputing those links. Depending on the number of links you have will of course determine how long it takes. Like I said, for me it took almost an hour to have all the links populate in the program, then maybe an extra 30 minutes to actually download the photos.

There is a little window to the right that stays up unless you close it as you go about doing you to let you know where it is.

You can always see what image JDownloader will download if you open the + by the name of the image and then right click and select Open in Browser.

You will notice that there are two files for each name. Which is perfectly fine. You will only get one image as the other is acting as a mirror. Unless you removed the .html from the first url but not the th_ in the second url. In that case you will have two sets of images. If you did not remove the th_ as instructed then you will have one set of images with the original names and another set with th before the names. Again the th is thumbnail.

Now before you go any further, you’re going to want to head over to the settings tab in JDownloader and tell it where to download your photos. As you can see, I sent mine to a folder called photobucket.

Once it is done populating the links, and you have set the settings to your liking click on Start all downloads and sit back and let it download the images.

You may or may not get a few of these popups- I got a ton of them as I had many mood folders for LiveJournal (which unless you ever used and customized LiveJournal you probably don’t know what I am talking about) and JDownloader doesn’t know the folder structure that you had on Photobucket.

Each image gets it’s own folder named for what the image is named, but if you get one of these, just click Rename file, and make sure Remember selection for this package is ticked then hit OK.

Once it is finished you should have a folder filled with folders that have an image (or more) in them. You can check the number of files in the lower left corner. Mine doesn’t match the number I have as many files had the same name so are in the same folder. BUT I am redoing the link upload to see which files are offline or show an Error so I can go get the images myself and download them.

If you click to the left of the name of the image, it should open the folder and show you which image had problems.

Best way to see what the URL of the error or offline image is to right click on it then Properties and Show Download URLs.

That opens up a box that shows what URL the image is and this way you can go into the correct folder on Photobucket.

Now I can try and get the image through the link, but there’s a good possibility that won’t work so I just use the link to see what the picture looks like (as it has been awhile since I’ve looked at them) and then go see what folder I have it in on Photobucket, in this case one called Gifs and go to that folder and download it from Photobucket.

A little trick to highlighting a row in Notepad++; if you click to the left of the number, it will highlight that entire row then all you have to do is CTRL+C and paste it in your browser.

And if for some reason the image doesn’t show itself because Photobucket is going to Photobucket, you can always go into the folder and click on the first image, then scroll through them keeping an eye on the tab for the name of the image. Like this Wedgie gif.

From here you can do what you want. I may or may not go through and organize these back into folders as they were on Photobucket, but the point is I have them all and now I can close my Photobucket account and tell them to kiss it.

If only they didn’t get money hungry. I had always championed for Photobucket until they started making things difficult long before they did money grabs. Now I use Flickr like I mentioned but haven’t used them long enough to know all the ins and outs.

Also doesn’t help that the images don’t always pop up upon command which is why you’ll want to check for errors. Took me forever to get a single folder to open with all the images. It would open but show nothing.

This took me a good part of my day, but I was also taking screetshots and playing with JDownloader to find the best way to do things, like finding out what tired gif didn’t download from which folder as I had six different images with that name.

I can guarantee that this is NOT the fastest and simplest solution with JDownloader. BUT AT LEAST IT WORKS!

Feel free to blow up the comments with ways it can be done easier or faster than my method. With or without JDownloader. And they had better work or I will troll your pathetic ass.

Until Next Time: Self isolation is actually pretty fun. Sort of been trying to do it for years. Thankfully where I am in Mexico people haven’t lost their fucking minds and bought up all the tp. In reality, you’ll be quarantined for two months max. If you are using 4,000 rolls of tp in a two month time, you have something besides COVID-19 to worry about.

LOL It’s June now. Still in quarantine. Although with what’s going on in the world right now, it’s the last thing anyone is thinking about. Although it’s just as deadly as those cops were to George Floyd. Be careful out there people, please!

Also, I still have not run out of TP from the two 36 packs I bought back in March. So the tp hording was still insane.