Last modified: 2014-11-17 09:48:23 UTC
Currently, in a page, category, or gallery, all pics show a link to its commons' page such as * => http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Blason_Aiguebelle.svg And that's only when in this page, that, finding a link such as * http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/BlasonSavenay.svg , the user can download one-by-one the true media file. In the category page, "right-clic + download all images linked" doesn't work neither. I think commons need to have a tool to enable users to download all the media files of a page or category just by one clic. At least on commons, in the Toolbox. Or on http://tools.wikimedia.de . I really think that we need a way to download quickly all the files of one page or category. I mean the true file, not the 100px preview visible in the category-page. That may be usefull to share media of all categories with hundreds of files, such : * Category:Chinese stroke order in BW pictures (~1.200 files) * Category:Coats_of_arms ** and its subcategories *** And sub-subCategory such as Category:SVG coats of arms - France (300 files) **.... As said pfctdayelise : "[that may be interesting to find a solution to download serie of media, since] this it gets asked quite often..." pfctdayelise (说什么?) 05:35, 3 October 2006 (UTC) Platonides then said on the village pump : "I could make such program (i already did one to list the images on a category) but should better ask brion or Tim about a proper delay." 19:35, 3 October 2006 (UTC) A solution is need.
While such a feature sounds quite nice to have, it poses several problems: * It would be a violation of CC and GFDL to offer such an archive without including information about license, creator, uploader, history, etc. Basically, the image description pages would have to be packet along with the files. * Compression does not work well on bitmap files like png/jpeg/gif (because they are already compressed). It would be a huge waste of cpu cycles to try. Perhaps a non-compression format like tar could be used, or such files could be stored in the zip-archive with no compression. * Creating such an archive takes quite a bit of resources, and may take to long to be done "live" in an HTTP request. It would probably be a good way to implement some type of throtteling and/or caching; Perhaps it would be best to do this as an "asynchronous" service: registered users could request an archive and would receive an email with a download link when it is done. * Traversing subcategories recursively may have unintended effects - one erronous categorization could cause several thousand files to be included, even though they are not really wanted. It may be a good idea to show all categories that would be included, along with a total number of files and a total uncompressed size to the user to confirm - but that may already be too expensive to compute "live". But there must also be a hard limit - someone *will* try to download *everything* - for a large wikipedia or commons, several terrabytes, if I recall correctly. So, the request is reasonable, but not trivial to implement.
Enable this function at least for administrator seem good. Copyright : a table with [ License | Uploader | ImageName ] seem to be need.
An Idea : [ ImageName | License | Uploader ] can be merge in a new dowloaded file name, such as : * On commons : [ Image:France_map.png | CC-sa-fr | Uploaded by Piom ] * downloaded on you computer : France_map-CC-sa-fr-Piom.png Problem, I really have no idea how do such thing.
what about this request ?
Commons really need this functions, at least for admin, otherwise categories such http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bw.png_stroke_order_images or http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Coats_of_arms_of_France , where users have involve so much energy to accumulate this images, are IMPOSSIBLE to download, and so totally useless.
Since this requires extracting data to obtain author and license information, it is more a task for the toolserver. Another possibility is to add all revisions of the image description page to the archive, and have a static set of files added to the image (licenses).
Raising priority, this is a very requested feature which prompted the creation of the partial workaround https://toolserver.org/~platonides/catdown/catdown.php (linked from Commons default sidebar).
(In reply to Nemo from comment #7) > Raising priority, this is a very requested feature which prompted the > creation of the partial workaround > https://toolserver.org/~platonides/catdown/catdown.php (linked from Commons > default sidebar). Sorry, but I'm going to re-lower this to low priority. Well it would be cool, it would be quite complicated to implement, both technically (Some categories have over a TB worth of images in them...), and socially with regards to license compliance. At the same time this hardly seems like a critical feature to commons
