A number of BoingBoing readers who have free moblog accounts on Textamerica are freaking out over news that the company will shut off free accounts on July 1, then delete the user contents therein, and switch to a $99/year fee-mandatory model.
Users who don't want to commit to "paid" but also don't want to lose all their pics one week from now are asking for advice on how to download copies of the photos they uploaded to the site. This app is helpful, but works only under limited circumstances.
Textamerica has not responded to emails I've sent asking if they provide instructions (say, FTP access or something) for content retrieval. BB pal Craig Engler, a longtime Textamerica user, says:
Crap, I have like two years worth of photos on there. Any BB'ers know the easiest way to get all your photos off Textamerica? Typically, the tool Textamerica provides for downloading your photo library does not work, at least for me. I'm thinking of trying the "DownThemAll" extension for Firefox to grab the images one painful page at a time…
Suggestions welcome here! Previous BoingBoing post: Textamerica goes fee-only, will delete all old, free moblogs.
Reader commentses: Craig later reported that he was able to siphon his stuff safely home with GetPix, a PC shareware app.
BB reader Brendon says,
For the Mac users out there, Sitesucker is a tool (donation-ware) that will allow you to download all the links off of a particular webpage. It's not perfect, but, with appropriate configuration, I'd think that people could use it to get their content back. (How Textamerica is going to get their customers back is another story; I certainly won't be running out to do business with them.) I don't know of a Windows equivalent, but I'm sure it exists.
Stu says,
Envision is a utility for Mac that can create a slideshow from a web page. It starts at one web page then follows all the links on that page to download pics. It can ignore gifs and small images. If one image links to another it will only download the linked image. I think it lets you save the images, but if nothing else you can do a file search for one of the filenames and see where it cached them.
Other readers point to HTTrack, "a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility," and GNU WGET, "a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols."
Reader comment: Merced says,
I have not tried it but WebSlinky is an application that a friend of mine wrote that will download an entire site to your hard drive from just the url. This includes images and movies. It changes all the links in the files so that it should still operate locally. It has been around a long time and I am not sure what structure that textamerica uses. Link
Brian Kusler says,
if you or your friend or your work already has a copy of Acrobat (like the full one you have to pay for), you can choose File > Create PDF > From Web Page and it will slurp the whole site into a big PDF. i know it ain't free, but it sure was easy :)
Dave H. says,
2 firefox extensions spring to mind – linky and magpie. Linky opens multiple links in tabs, magpie downloads all open tabs after the current one – both have more functionality than that, but that's how I use them for grabbing thumbnail galleries. Of, er… art.
Caines says,
This may be a hoax, but it looks like TextAmerica is holding a contest to give away a “lifetime” membership to their service. The rules? Post a message explaining “What TA Means To Me”. I’m not sure when this contest actually started. I’ll add this under my list of TextAmerica announcements that I did not receive. The contest ends on the magical day of July 1.
Paul says,
This is a command-line utility called Warrick: Link. It goes through and tries to re-create a site using a bunch of different services. I would suggest that people try it out who are tech-savvy. It may capture all the images that people have stored on their sites. Worth a try, at least.
