Downloading a Complete Picasa Web Album (Without Installing Picasa)
Google’s Picasa Web Album supports downloading an entire album, however, it requires the Picasa software to do so. Bummer if you are on a Mac, or don’t want to (or can’t) install Picasa on your computer.
There’s another tutorial online that suggests using a Greasemonkey script to surface the download links, then use the DownThemAll Firefox extension to grab the links.
Sadly, the Greasemonkey script in question stopped working after a recent code change on the picasa website. I was able to easily fix it, but due to the lack of an open license, I am unable to share the script with you 
However, I found an alternative solution: The album’s RSS feed! Along with the aforementioned DownThemAll extension, you can easily download a complete album off Picasa Web. Here is how:
Go to the desired Album, and click the “RSS” link on the right hand side:
Firefox will show you the RSS feed in a more or less appealing way. Note that each of the pictures shown has an “attached” JPEG file underneath:
The only thing we need to do is download all of these with DownThemAll. For that, right-click, and choose “DownThemAll”. In the “links” tab, it’ll automatically grab all pictures for you:
Just hit “start” and let it load!
Hope this helps!
Hey,
this works fine, but with private albums its a problem as there is no RSS feed
any workarounds for that?
Brilliant Idea! Thank YOU!
excellent tip….. works well with all sort of Album options, mine of others..
Thank you very much for this nice tip. What I appreciate the most, is the simplicity of the explanation. I’m not very good in english and sometimes i dont really understand tutorials but yours is easy and simple.
You just saved me a lot of time!
Yesterday, I downloaded 1100 pictures 1 by 1…..
thank you!
Thanks alot man, this works like a charm and saved me ALOT of time!
You are welcome, guys!
Thanks a lot man. It worked!
well – after coming back to try to use this, i found an issue. If pics are loaded in the album that are greater than 1600×1200, this trick only gets you a downsized 1600×1200 version. Worse than that, the EXIF data is stripped from those downsized versions. So, while this works in a pinch, it still has some some serious drawbacks as far as I can tell. I’ve tried some of the other tools out there, but none of them seem to work. Apart from Picasa itself of course, but i can’t stand that piece of software, so I ain’t touchin’ it.
Well…that RSS idea is awesome:)…Thanks so much!
Awesome idea, thanks a lot. Saved me a lot of time and clicking.
I wrote a Ruby script for downloading all the photos in Picasa Web albums, grouped by album. This gets the original photos, not 1600×1200 thumbnails.
You can read about how to use it here: http://blog.costan.us/2010/01/automated-backup-for-picasa-web-albums.html
Victor: This is great, thanks for sharing it!
This seems great.but the issue for me is,latest versions of firefox doesn’t support download them all add-on.well there is another easy way to get files.you guys may already know this.if you guys use IDM [Internet Download Manager],there is a feature in internet explorer or firefox [*opera doesn't support this kind of integration],go to the picasa album then right click anywhere and hit “download all links with idm”.then it show a lot of files,but it’s too easy to find the photos if you sort them well.best thing is,it gives the photos with exact sizes.you can select the photos only or whatever you need to download and put them in the download queue.if you have downloads already in queue,you will have to select the all the pics and hit download.it seems easy to me but i don’t know how you guys would.i haven’t had issues with this yet.so try this.
Thanks lots for this. You rocks!
Hey man. Just wanted to thank you for the tip. I never knew about the DownThemAll add-on, nor the RSS feed for Picasa albums. That worked very well. Great work!