Scrapbook mass picture downloading

[sameolddave]

Title
Scrapbook mass picture downloading

Short, concise description of the idea
The ability to download whole galleries of pictures from one's scrapbook at once

Full description of the idea
In order to download the originals from scrapbook, one must click through a gallery to a picture, then to that picture's small version, then yet another click to the original size, and then some kind of right-click action to save the picture onto the harddrive. A tool like "download them all" for Firefox has the potential to accomplish this, but there are one too many degrees of separation between the thumbnail in the gallery and the original. The thumbnail links to a resized picture > the resized picture links to the original.

This change to livejournal would be the following:

either
A) some functionality of scrapbook that allows one to download an entire gallery or several galleries, probably as a zipped archive (just like dropbox or other websites that bundle multiple selected files into a zip)

or

B) include an option to view the galleries with a decrease of the degree of separation of thumbnails from 2 to 1. In other words, the thumbnail in the gallery would link to the original, and then one could use a tool like download them all on firefox to retrieve their images.

B seems like the simpler, faster option, but I still think A is important. so B might be a fgood temporary fix until A could be implemented.
An ordered list of benefits

• Many users, including myself, have used the high data capacity of their scrapbooks to archive same as original copies of their photographs. When somebody's hard drive crashes, lose their computer, or are out of state/out of the country and need to access full galleries of photos for work/home etc, the hassle of downloading pictures one by one is very troubling. This would alleviate that hassle.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Of course bandwidth is a a big issue. My galleries of originals approach 200MB, so downloading even just one gallery at once would put strain on the LJ servers. This could be alleviated greatly by limiting this service to paid/permanent members like myself, and even a monthly/daily bandwidth restriction or say, one successful download of any given gallery per week/month etc.
  In many instances, as such as myself, this feature would be seldom used but when it is, it would be indispensable.
• Another problem might be failed downloads. If the LJ server archives an entire gallery into a zip and sends it to the user, and then the user breaks their wifi connection or the LJ server times out, the zip file would be useless and the process would have to start over. further burdening LJ and aggravating the user.
• So this may merit a more clever solution, like some kind of java implementation that downloads each picture separately and keeps track of successful downloads, or a feature in one of the downloadable clients for scrapbook.