Download Picasa Web Album Photos

One of the features I really like about .Mac Web Gallery is the ability to download all the photos in the album all at once. Unfortunately, Picasa web albums does not provide this functionality, so when people post their photos on Picasaweb, I use an Automator workflow to accomplish this.

1) Get Current Webpage from Safari - gets the url of the frontmost Safari window/tab, which in this case, is Picasaweb.
2) Get Enclosure URLs from Articles - this action automatically gets the RSS feed for the webpage (Picasaweb) and gets the urls for the enclosures in the feed, which are the photo urls
3) Download URLs - pretty self-explanatory



Subsequent actions could be "Import Photos into iPhoto" or "Open Images in Preview" or whatever.

The workflow can be saved as a Script Menu plugin (Save As Plugin... > Script Menu), and invoked from the script menu whenever a new Picasa web album is posted.

Modifications:

To make the download location dynamic every time the workflow is run, the "Download URLs" action can be set to show when run, which means that action's UI will pop up every time the workflow runs and allow the user to select the download location.



Or, because for some unfathomable reason people insist on using Firefox, replace the "Get Current Webpage from Safari" action with a "Run AppleScript" action that will enable the same functionality with Firefox. In the "Run AppleScript" action, replace the placeholder text with:


on run {input, parameters}
     tell application "Firefox"
          return «class curl» of window 1
     end tell
end run


which just gets the url of the frontmost Firefox window/tab and sends it along to the enclosures action.



The "Get Enclosure URLs from Articles" action works only on Mac OS X 10.5, so if you don't have Leopard yet, you should go get it. :) </shamelessplug>