Downloading entire albums with Aria2

Getting back the original photos

An important advantage of ipernity compared to social media sites like Instagram is that always the original file is stored at ipernity and you can get it back if needed. On Instagram for example uploaded photos are always downsized to a maximum height of 1350 pixel and a maximum width of 1080 pixel. When uploading photos to Instagram taken with a modern camera, therefore the resolution typically is reduced to a tiny fraction of the original resolution, while the same photos are stored with 100% of the original resolution on ipernity!

But if you want to download a whole album from ipernity it would be quite a hassle having to download each single photo separately. For paying users ipernity therefore offers a download feature for albums: Go to an album page and choose "Download the entire album" from the tools menu. When choose "Retrieve the download file" in the popup window. Now a so called metalink-file will be downloaded to your computer that contains download-links for all photos in the chosen album. With the right third-party-software you can then automatically download all photos of the album to your computer.

Chosing the right third-party-software for processing metalink-files

The user interface of ipernity in the past mentioned the windows app "Free Download Manager" and the Firefox browser extension "DownThemAll" as third-party-software for processing metalink-files. Regrattably both have ceased to work some time ago (although DownThemAll still works with the Seamonkey browser!). While updating the old FAQ we therefore have explored alternative third-party-software. We have found the free software uGet. But then we faced the problem that uGet doesn't exist for MacOS. So we began to search for alternatives. Behind the scenes uget uses the prgramme "aria2" for processing metalink-files. Or in other words: uGet simply acts as a frontend user-interface for aria2. So the idea was to use aria2 directly for downloading albums. Initially we tested aria2 on windows but there exists a MacOS-version, too. Meanwhile Mac users have confirmed that donwloading entire albums with aria2 works on MacOS, too.

Using aria2 with windows

Step 1: Install aria2

You have first to install aria2. That can be done by the following steps:

a) Go to https://aria2.github.io/ and choose the download link for the current version.
b) On the next page scroll down and choose the win-32bit or win-64bit zip-file depending on your windows version. This will start the download.
c) Once the download is complete open the zip-file either directly from your browser or by double click on the downloaded file in the windows file explorer. Then double click on the only folder in the archive.
d) Now mark the file aria2c.exe with a single click and copy it with ctrl-c.
e) Chose a folder in the windows explorer that you want to copy the file aria2c.exe to. For example you could chose "C:\Windows". Then paste the file aria2c.exe to that folder with ctrl-v. The advantage of the folder "C:\Windows" is that windows will easily find the file aria2c.exe when you try to execute it from the command line by simply typing "aria2c" later. If you chose another folder you might have to type the full path to the file in order to start aria2 from the command line.

Step 2: Download metalink file

To further proceed with downloading an entire album you have to download the metalink file for that album first as described at the beginning of this article if you haven't already done.

Step 3: Download photo files by executing aria2 in the comand line interface

Press the windows key, type "cmd" and click on the command prompt desktop app. Then a black window with the command line interface opens. In that window type the following command:

aria2c -M metalinkfile -d downloadfolder

Here metalinkfile needs to be replaced by the full path to the metlaink file for your album that you have downloaded before. And downloadfolder needs to be replaced by the full path to the folder that you want to download your photos to.

If you don't want to type the full path you can avoid that as follows:

When typing the command above in the window of the command line interface open a second window with the windows file explorer. Then right click on the metalink file in the windows file explorer and choose "Properties" from the menu. In the "General" tab of the pop up window the folder path to your metalink file is displayed besides "Location". If you mark the folder path you can copy it with ctrl-c. Then go back to the window of the command line interface. There you can paste the folder name with ctrl-v. Add a "\" and then add the name of the metalink file itself. You can copy the name of the metalink file from the popup window in the same way as the folder path. In the popup window the name of the metalink file is displayed at the top.

With the same method you can copy and paste the name of the downloadfolder.

Example:

The full path of your metalink file is


and the full path to your downloadfolder is


The full command that you need to type in the window of the command line interface is:

aria2c -M C:\Users\John\Downloads\download.aldum-1022140.metalink -d C:\Users\John\Pictures\downloads

Here you can copy and paste the paths "C:\Users\John\Downloads" and "C:\Users\John\Pictures" from the windows file explorer as explained above.

When you have entered the full command press return. Then the download should start and the progress is indicated in the window of the command line interface. If the download is completed a table displaying all downloaded files is shown.If something goes wrong one or several red error messages might appear.

Using aria2 with MacOS

I don't have a MacOS computer and therefore couldn't test the use of aria2 on a Mac myself. But here are instructions how to install aria2 on a Mac: http://macappstore.org/aria2/

Then steps 2 and 3 should be similar on a Mac as described above. Instead of the windows command line interface you need to use the terminal app of your Mac.