“There are millions of images on the web, but no convenient way to download them besides clicking on them one by one. HyperImage is the solution: an industrial-strength tool for downloading entire websites worth of pictures all at once. Just point HyperImage to any website, and watch as thousands of pictures stream down to your computer.”
I have been using HyperImage ($29.99) for so long now that I actually forgot that I was going to review it! Trust me, that is a good sign!! If something integrates itself so easily and usefully into my workflow that is pretty impressive. To me it is anyway!
For me this is a ‘love it or hate’ type of application. If you have a need for it then it is great, if you have no or little need for it then you probably (and understandably) couldn’t care less. I know that is a statement that could be applied to pretty much any application but some you just look at and go “Yes”, others “No Way”. I had been looking for a way of capturing images off web sites (and I know how that may sound), but (and this may be even sadder) one of the first things I did was capture every image off the Apple Site! So I may not have every Apple product but I do have a picture of them all – useful for reviews and excellent as a slideshow.
93 images related to the iPhone, 2800+ images in total off the Apple site.
More practically, as you can imagine my own site has a lot of images (276 at the last count), and keeping track of them for future use, backing them up, and basically just knowing what I have used before is really important to me.
When I am doing a review or an article I often want a lot of pictures of a site, not always to use but to have available for potential use, comparisons, detail information etc.
HyperImage has saved me so much time in both of these scenarios that I really can’t imagine being without it now. Granted using the image again can be a little convoluted in that there is no (Save As option) but it is possible to copy it or open it with an editor. For tracking, viewing, moving the images around it is excellent. The display option in particular is very neat, very iPhoto like.
What They Say
Do you download lots of images from the web? HyperImage is made for you. Enter the address of a website, and HyperImage will download every image from every page on the site. HyperImage is the ultimate tool to conduct research, scour the Internet for eye-candy, or keep abreast of the latest fashion trends.
HyperImage is highly customizable. Fine-tune HyperImage to your needs, and download all the images you want, but skip the ones you don’t want. You can choose to download images in the same folder, on the same server, or in the same domain. You can also include or exclude images by name or file extension. Or even filter images by file size or pixel size.
For even more precise results, you can also specify which links HyperImage follows. Many websites store their pictures in different folders, or even on different servers. HyperImage gives you the advanced tools to get exactly the pictures you want, no matter how the target website is organized.
HyperImage includes a built-in image browser, so you can see all the images you’ve downloaded using a convenient column-view interface. HyperImage even preserves the folder structure of each website on your computer, so images from each site are grouped together.
HyperImage downloads images fast by making multiple connections to each web server. You can also download from several websites at the same time. The Activity Viewer shows you what’s happening at a glance: what’s being downloaded at the moment, what’s in the queue, what’s already been downloaded, and what was skipped.
Fine-tune your download options by looking at the Activity Viewer. For every image that was skipped and every link that wasn’t followed, the Activity Viewer tells you why. Then you can adjust your downloading options to get exactly the pictures you need.
Many websites have galleries with sequentially numbered images. To download every image in a gallery as fast as possible, enter an address with a numeric range in brackets, such as [001-137]. HyperImage will then download each image one after the other until the whole gallery is on your computer.
Downloading lots of pictures from many different sites? HyperImage is the industrial-strength answer to your needs. Just enter all the addresses of the websites or galleries you want to download from, and HyperImage will download images fast from all of them at once.
The Services menu lets you invoke HyperImage from other programs. You can select the address bar in your web browser and choose “Download from HyperImage” to download all the images from the current website. Or if you have a list of addresses in a text document, you can download them all with one command.
Like the theory of this software a lot – unfortunately the copy I installed crashes each time I try to pull down the images from a site. I am planning to re-download and install the software to see if this fixes the issue. (Probably an I.D.10.T error on my part!)
To update – now reinstalled and tested again. With smaller websites (i.e. ones I have created) no problems grabbing the images – however on larger sites I tested (www.simplebits.com for example) it gets so far then crashes. On reopening the app I find it has grabbed images but not all I believe. I will recheck the terms of the demo to see if it is limited to a certain number of images. Would be interested if anyone out there with Hyperimage could test say the simplebits site and see if they have the same issue.
However, it is a great app and I love what it does. provided I can sort out the occassional crashes I will be purchasing in the near future.
Off the top of my head I think the demo does have some restrictions