Maybe you want to to save an image or video clip from the web through your browser because it will make a great background or you want to include it in a video you’re making. In most cases (especially when it comes to images) you can simply right-click on the file and choose “save image as” or something similar.
But sometimes it doesn’t work or it’s not good enough. What if there is no save option in the right-click menu? What if you want to quickly save dozens of images from a single web page? What if you’re trying to save an animated video as a GIF or keep downloading one of those .webp files that nobody wants?
There can be handy third-party browser extensions, plug-ins that will dig deeper into the HTML code of a page to pull out the image or video clip you’re looking for and automate the process for you.
Image Downloader continues
Open Image Downloader Continued (Chrome/Edge) and you’ll get a neatly organized grid of all the images on the current web page: you can see the format and dimensions of each image, save them to disk, and even filter and order them based on their size. The plugin couldn’t be easier to use, and it’s one of the best for downloading images.
Download all images
Downloading All Images (Chrome/Edge) works a little differently than Image Downloader Continued. It might be able to grab some images when Image Downloader Continued can’t, and vice versa. Click the expand button when you’re on the site and every image on the page will be wrapped in a zip archive so you just have to choose where to save it.
Video Downloader Ultimate
If you’re struggling to save a video from a website—whether it’s embedded in a page or included in a social media post—Video Downloader Ultimate (Chrome/Edge) can help. With one click, you’ll see a list of all the videos included in the web page you’re currently viewing, and then you can either get their URLs or save them locally.
Twitter Video Downloader
Sometimes you need a website-specific tool, and that’s where Twitter Video Downloader (Chrome/Edge) comes in: it grabs clips posted on the social network with minimal fuss and embeds itself neatly into the page so it almost looks like a native feature. Just click the download icon next to the video tweet to save the file.
Base Image Downloader
GIFs can be particularly difficult to pick apart. Some websites post them as GIFs, others use the mp4 format, and others convert them again. Regardless of format, Base Image Downloader (Chrome/Edge) excels at downloading almost anything GIF-related (and supports most other image formats). The extension brings a gallery of thumbnail images and you can save them all at once or one by one.
Screen Recorder and Editor
If other tools don’t work, you can try using a screen capture tool instead. Screen Recorder And Editor (Chrome/Edge) is one of the best, in my experience, that gives you tons of options to record the active tab or the entire desktop, and includes editing features.
Save the WE page
Another option for downloading elements from a web page in bulk is to save the entire page, which Save Page WE (Chrome/Edge) does quite well. It is easy to use and supports keyboard shortcuts. Depending on the site you’re working with, you may choose to save images from the page to disk, and in some cases this works for audio and video files as well.
Download all images
Although Download All Images (Firefox) has the same name as the second extension above, it’s not the same utility—and this one works with Mozilla’s browser. This plugin offers tons of options, allowing you to filter downloads by image size, image type, and even image URL (so you don’t accidentally download ads or other related content), and there’s plenty of flexibility when it comes to how they’re captured images save.
DownThemAll
The aptly named DownThemAll (Firefox) can download absolutely anything from a web page, including images, videos, and audio recordings. It is by no means a blunt instrument and comes with plenty of options to choose what to save and where to save. This is one of those extensions that you will quickly find indispensable.
SingleFile
Another extension for saving entire web pages, SingleFile (Firefox) is one of the best and most efficient in the business. It will download all the HTML, text and images on a given web page and integrates very neatly into the Firefox interface. If you’re struggling to download images with other extensions, this might be the solution.