Fetching things with File Fisher

Tuesday, November 30, 2004

bluefish Finally got around to "finishing" this FireFox extension. I called it "FileFisher" and only just realised what a crappy name it is. Hopefully that'll get an upgrade in the next version... Anyhoo, FileFisher is a tool to download photos that your friends have been too lazy to meaningfully rename before they stuck them on the web. You use it anytime you realise that the file names you want have an obvious sequence - like image01.jpg, image02.jpg, image03.jpg... image50.jpg etc etc..

Click on the first image and load it into a browser tab. Now start FileFisher from the tools menu. You will see the current URL in the top bar of FileFisher, and many wierd options below it... What we are going to do is swap the "sequence number" part of the URL for our token.... so if the URL in FileFisher is "http://www.allThesesImages.com/media/image01.jpg" manually change the "image01.jpg" to read "imageAA.jpg".

fishfisher Then set the numbers you want to try and grab... so, say you want to grab image1.jpg through to image99.jpg, put "1" in the start field, and "99" in the end field. Choose your download directory and "go fish". The AA bit will be substituted with each number in turn, and the files downloaded.

It works with any file type - but for zip, wav and other filetypes that download rather than displaying in the browser, you'll need to paste the URL directly into FileFisher. Filefisher has a couple of other tricks up it's sleeve too, but you can read all about them in the Help.

Theres heaps planned for the next version, but I have a very short attention span and it's amazing it got as polished as it is now. As it stands, the program is filled with bugs and strange behaviour so let me know what interesting and wonderful problems you find.

So get crackin' and install FileFisher v0.4 (for Firefox 2.0.* and below)

This was written by Mr Speaker. Posted on at 9:53 am. Filed under Firefox, Nerd. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

14 Comments

There is no “Go Fish” button! That makes it extrmeely difficult to use.

I am using Firefox 1.0.4

Monday, May 16, 2005 at 5:43 pm | Permalink
Hey Jonathan,

It’s there, it’s just hidden… The default window size is too small and you need to resize it to see the “Go Fish” and “Close” buttons. It remembers your window size when you resize it – thats why I never realised it was too small! Thanks for the bug find!

Monday, May 16, 2005 at 8:01 pm | Permalink
Great Idea, should save a lot of time.

A question, what if a file doesn’t exist? Does it continue the sequence or stop because there are no more after?

Could you include this as an option?

1 to 6 Images but you put in 1-10 as your guess – you don’t want to count them manually. Once it gets to 7 it realisies there are no more images, it stops. Some sites however might miss out a number accidently/deliberately – you could have an option to allow a few missed numbers?

or maybe the option to automatically renumber/rename the files when you get them? As with my previous point if a site misses out the number 6 in 1-10 images, you could have it automatically renumber them to be in order again.
Just a few suggestions.

Thanks Again!

Tuesday, August 16, 2005 at 11:29 pm | Permalink
A little bit buggy, but thanks, works very well.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 at 12:24 pm | Permalink
Hey, It’s me again.

I was just stopping by to inquire about an update for more recent Firefox builds. If you don’t work on this anymore, let me be the first to tell you that it’s too bad, as your extension was very helpful.

Thanks.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 4:12 pm | Permalink
Ok, ok… how can I refuse revisiting this one, with sweet talkin’ like that…

Hopefully I’ll get some time in the next week to have a look.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 9:08 pm | Permalink
Hi

Make new version for newer firefox? (1.5….. etc.)

cu

Thursday, November 3, 2005 at 3:29 am | Permalink
Oh, trust me, my seewt-talking has been refused on more than one occassion. ;)

Nice to see it may be working in this situation though. Should I bat my eyelashes some more?

Friday, November 11, 2005 at 6:00 am | Permalink
Just a reminder…..

Or whatever.

Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 9:08 pm | Permalink
Hey Jonathan – I don’t know what I’ve bodged up here, but just download that xpi, and run it locally. For some reason it’s saying “not compatible” from the link, but works if you download and run it… wierd!

Friday, January 27, 2006 at 7:18 am | Permalink
Hi, is a good plugin but i have installed the 1.5.0.1 and is not compatible, can you “make” compatible with this version, please???? Thanks.

Seb.

Monday, February 6, 2006 at 12:33 am | Permalink
Hey Mr. Speaker.

Thank you much for the update. Firefox actually updated the extension itself.

Go figure.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 12:24 am | Permalink
Weird…lately Filefisher won’t download any image that I haven’t already loaded. Eg. in my cache already. o_0

It used to work fine…XD Still works fine in Portable Firefox at school, blarg.

Monday, February 27, 2006 at 4:46 pm | Permalink
Hi Mr. Speaker,
I’m in love with this extension, it’s GREAT. A couple of suggestions though:
– Can you create a toolbar icon please, much faster than going to the Tools menu.
– Can you make it remember the last few used folders, or an option to add my most used folders.
– Can you add a renaming function to change file names on the fly, get it, fly fishing ;-).
Thank you for this nice addition to Firfox.

Monday, June 26, 2006 at 11:54 am | Permalink

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