Wednesday, April 21, 2010

How to ungrey "Download to Picasa" on PicasaWeb

I notice that when I run Picasa and "Import from Web Albums," many of the albums never download all of their pictures. For example, in one album that has 373 pictures, Picasa downloads a seemingly random 272 of them. Others who had this problem on-line said that using the "Download to Picasa" link on PicasaWeb (under the "Download" menu) would fix this problem. That is, that link would download all pictures. Unfortunately, all of the "Download" links are greyed out in my browser (Firefox on Linux).

To fix this problem, I installed the Greasemonkey firefox addon and then created this simple Greasemonkey script to trick Google into "ungreying" those download links.

Now I can click "Download to Picasa" and have it download all of those photos. My first trial download hasn't finished yet because it doesn't seem to care that 272 photos have already been downloaded, and so I'm not quite sure what the ultimate outcome will be... However, I think this is progress.

NOTE: For Linux users, adding a single line to the file ~/.mailcap that has in it:
application/x-picasa-detect; false; description=Picasa Installation detection
(in all one line; no wrapping) will also ungrey "Download to Picasa". Unfortunately, that only seems to convince PicasaWeb that Picasa2 is installed. To get all four options ungreyed, the force script is needed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't want to installed GreaseMonkey, but I have Chromium browser installed and that worked immediately...

Anonymous said...

With the script (how did you install it in Chrome?) or without? If the latter, you're accessing an album that doesn't have downloads disabled - this posting does not apply to you!

BTW, DownThemAll will do this w/o GreaseMonkey, but it doesn't run on Chrome.