originally posted to dreamwidth on 2021-05-27

original post can be found here (archive link, second archive link)

video tutorial embedded in original post can be viewed here or downloaded

if anyone's tried looking for old icon posts on dreamwidth and livejournal, they likely have ran into icons hosted by photobucket. and because photobucket is annoying as all hell, they make it near impossible to save those icons, by slapping watermarks on them, fucking with the urls, and somehow disabling something as simple as ctrl+s to save a fucking image. i've had my workarounds for downloading an icon manually, but downloading an entire batch at once has basically been impossible because of these limitations. but i think i finally figured it out, so i'd like to share how i did it and maybe help other people running into the same problems lol

• this might stop working in the future if photobucket changes something else again. if that happens i'll probably find another way to download icons because when there's a will there's a fucking way, and then i'll update this tutorial or write another, depending on how much it's changed
• there's probably an easier way to go about this but i barely know what i'm doing so just roll with it unless you know how to simplify it (suggestions are appreciated!)
• i honestly don't know if this is just a me problem or if photobucket's like this universally but i might as well share it anyway and help someone out
• also this works with basically all photobucket-hosted images on a page and not just icons, if anyone wants to use this for something else lol

what you'll need is gallery-dl, a command-line program for downloading images and image galleries and shit online. it's available for windows macos and linux, but since i'm on linux i'm not sure how to go about installing it from the first two - i assume windows is relatively easy though and macos probably isn't that far off from linux. if you're not sure how to install it the github page has guides, or you can google it

(by the way, if you're wondering why i don't use wget which is widely known of rather than gallery-dl, it's because wget downloads the icons with the watermarks on them. i'm not sure how gallery-dl gets them without watermarks but who cares it works)

so you have the icon post you want to save - for this tutorial i'm using this post of akb48 icons. first step is to make a folder somewhere to save the icons. just make it where you want to keep the icons or something idk. i just called mine “icons” and sorted it where i save other icons.

navigate to that folder in the terminal - on linux and i think windows too you can just open the terminal in the folder, or you can navigate to it with the cd command. for example:

cd "/home/melodicake/Pictures/Miscellaneous/icon archive/livejournal/wherepigsflyy/dfsgsdfgsdfg/icons"

run the following command, replacing url with the url of the icon post you're downloading from:

gallery-dl -g "r:url" > filenames.txt

for example, mine would be the following:

gallery-dl -g "r:https://wherepigsflyy.livejournal.com/2083.html" > filenames.txt

what this does is get the urls of everything on the page, including the photobucket image urls, and then saves them to a generated text file titled “filenames.txt” (though you can change that to something else if you want to lol).

since this got literally every single url on the page, you have to manually open the txt file and delete all the urls except the photobucket image urls. they'll all be bunched together so just search for them in notepad using control+f (or command+f on mac) and copy them, then delete everything else and paste only the photobucket urls.

here's that in image form since that's probably confusing lol (click for full size):

next, and this is important, save the txt file with just the photobucket urls in it. it should be the same filenames.txt file, just ctrl+s or file>save or whatever in notepad

back to the terminal, with the photobucket urls saved in filenames.txt, enter this command:

gallery-dl -i filenames.txt

this pulls the urls from the txt file and downloads them all. the names of the icons will either be the full photobucket urls or just the names they're saved as in photobucket - it's usually the former for me but sometimes they came out as the latter idk. anyway it should look like this in the terminal, maybe a little different on windows/mac (click for full size):

gallery-dl will probably create a new folder for this, so navigate there to watch the icons download if you want. obviously don't fuck with the folder until the download's finished or it'll interrupt it. depending on your connection it might take a couple minutes.

when the icons are done downloading, you can close the terminal window and delete the filenames.txt file. and of course you can move the icons elsewhere and delete the folder generated by gallery-dl if you want.

that's all really lol, so far i haven't run into any problems with this but if you need help feel free to comment and i'll try my best. happy icon saving!