how to upload/download images in bulk?

These days it has become a basic necessity to have a digital camera at your hands reach. Every one wants to capture moments forever in their lives and what better way than to click it away in front of your digital camera. with the increasing number of digital photos comes the responsibility of sharing them as well.

there are many online photo albums which ease that out for you. i have tried flickr and picasa till today and have toggled between the two for some minor complaints i had with them. finally i am settling with picasa. the reasons i chose it are very obvious.

1. it is free
2. no need for a separate account. you can start sharing with your gmail account itself.
3. you can download a handy and pretty impressive(in terms of GUI) tool picasa to manage your photos even the ones in your web album as well.
4. it is maintained by google :)

BUT if you are sneaking out and trying to upload your photos from your company network the firewall settings of the company wont allow picasa to be that effective in terms of uploading photos to your web album.

Having been through a similar issue i googled on how to upload photos in bulk INSPITE of the firewall. Below is one alternative i have tried and it works smooth.

you need to have mozilla firefox browser installed as the addon which does all the uploading works only with this browser for now. you can install the FREE browser from here.

I am a big fan of this browser and use it all the time unless i am working on a web app or company intranet apps which most of the time work only on IE. the next big thing you need to have on your machine is the universal uploader add on. you can download it from here . This addon allows you to upload images to flickr, picasa videos to youtube facebook blah blah and blah.

you can access the add on from the tools menu and just follow the on screen instructions.

now how to download your friends album in bulk from the online album. You cant sit saving each and every image on your PC from the album no matter how good your girlfriend looks in the album. atleast i dont have that much patience... well actually i dont have a girlfriend. the good thing is you dont have to do it one by one.

just ask your friend to share the album. once that is done you need to have the latest version of picasa intalled on your machine. you can find it here . once you have it installed just open the shared album and you will see a download album link below the album cover page. sweet...just click on that it will launch the installed picasa and follow the onscreen instructions to download the album..

let me know how the uploading/downloading stuff turned out in the comments. or if you have a better way of doing the same just share it in comments.