SmugMug Downloader Tools: Best to Use in 2023

SmugMug is one of the most popular paid photo sharing and image hosting websites. A lot of professional photographers use SmugMug to host their photos because it is easy to use and saves them the trouble from creating or managing their own website. A lot of useful features can be found on SmugMug ranging from simple basic settings to powerful smart gallery feature by dynamically adding images to a gallery based on keywords or other criteria. The images that are visible and accessible by visitors can also be downloaded but it’s limited to downloading one image at a time.

SmugMug has never made it an option to allow visitors to automatically download multiple images. If you want to bulk download the whole gallery, the official solution is to request the owner of the gallery to generate a ZIP file containing all the images in the Organize area in SmugMug and send you the download link when its done. There used to be quite a few third party software tools that can batch download all images from a gallery in SmugMug but unfortunately most of them no longer work after SmugMug switched to a new platform in 2013.

After testing, there’s only 2 tools that are left for visitors to download pictures from galleries hosted in SmugMug.

1. WinDownload

WinDownload is the frontend of the command line download utility CLDownload that can be used to download all pictures from SmugMug galleries. Other than automatically downloading all images in a gallery, it can also perform some image processing such as conversion of PNG to JPG, resize, and rotate.

Using the program to download all images in a gallery is pretty straight forward. After installation, run the program and you’ll be presented with a “Load a User’s Album List” dialog box. If you’re a visitor, simply enter the nickname and WinDownload will automatically pull and load all the albums to the list. For your information, the nickname is the same as the subdomain name, for example, the nickname for the URL raymondcc.smugmug.com would be raymondcc.

Simply tick the boxes from the list to download all the images in the gallery. Optionally, you can also select individual images to download by clicking on the button in the Selected Images column after ticking the checkbox.

Some additional options such as selecting the SmugMug image and video size, converting PNG to JPG format, resize, download images based on specified keywords are available at the bottom of the program. The final step is to select the location to save the downloaded images by clicking on the button at the Destination Root Folder. Click the Start Download button and WinDownload will automatically download the photos in bulk.

Downloaded images are automatically skipped unless the option “Overwrite Existing Files with the same name” is enabled. This feature is useful to resume the download process if the download halts before finished downloading. Do note that WinDownload automatically downloads one file at a time but cannot download multiple files simultaneously.

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2. Bulk Image Downloader

Bulk Image Downloader is a powerful shareware tool that can download full sized images from any web galleries including SmugMug. Although Bulk Image Downloader is an independent software that runs by itself, it must always be launched from the browser’s right click context menu “Open Current Page with BID” option. If you don’t see the Bulk Image Downloader from the right click context menu, you can install the official extension available for Opera, Chrome and Firefox from BID’s website.

After selecting the option “Open Current Page with BID” from your browser’s right click context menu, the Bulk Image Downloader program will launch and automatically detects all the full sized images from the thumbnails. You can automate the download by clicking the Download Files Now button or simply press the F9 key.

The official Bulk Image Downloader guide claims that it can automatically detect most of the popular multi page galleries but it doesn’t seem to work in SmugMug. We’ve reported this to the developers of BID and hopefully they’ll update it to support the multi page SmugMug gallery. A single user license cost $24.95 and entitles to free upgrades for 1 year. This would mean that you’d most probably need to pay for an upgrade if Bulk Image Downloader stops working due to changes made on SmugMug’s web interface.

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