Recently I’ve gotten a few inquiries on how to download all files from folder on a website. There are some websites that doesn’t have an index file and directory listing is enabled. When two of this requirements are met, you’ll see a web page that looks something like the image below.

It’s not tough to download all files in a folder. All you need is a download manager that supports downloading all files from a page or an offline browser which is able to crawl on pages and download everything that it finds. Here are my recommendations on what software to use to download all files from a folder on a website or FTP.

Like I mentioned earlier, there are a few methods. The first method that I’ll show you is how to download all files using Firefox. There is an excellent add-on called “DownThemAll” (or just dTa) which is a powerful yet easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox extension that lets you download all the links or images contained in a webpage and much more. It features an advanced accelerator that increases speed up to 400%, it allows you to pause and resume downloads at any time and, last but not least, it’s fully integrated into your favorite browser!

All you need to do is to install the addon, go to the page that has all the files that you want to download, right click and select DownThemAll. The DownThemAll window will appear with a list of files for you to download. Check the files and click Start.

[ Download DownThemAll! ]

If you prefer to use your own download manager software such as Orbit or FlashGet, you can install FlashGot add-on for Firefox, which has a function “FlashGot All”. It grabs all the links found in the current page and dispatches them to the default download manager.

[ Download FlashGot ]

These add-on works very well but there’s one problem. If there are directories inside the folder that you want to download, these add-ons won’t crawl in to the folder and get all the files in there. It will only download the folder as an index.htm file. To really have a one click download them all software, you should use an offline browser software. Teleport Pro and Offline Explorer are very good offline browsers but they are sharewares. I found a free offline browser called GetleftToGo which doesn’t require installation and it is able to download files inside a directory.

After downloading, extract and run GetleftToGo.exe. Go to File > Enter URL and enter the link that you want to download all the files. It will process the page and give you a list of files to download. You can easily select all the files by clicking the + for All. One important note is you must uncheck [To Parent Directory], or else it will also download whatever is in the parent directory.

[ Download GetleftToGo ]

If you want to download everything in a folder from FTP, the easiest way is to use a FTP client such as FileZilla. Just enter the server IP or host, port 21, username and password (if doesn’t allow anonymous login) and connect. You will see 2 panes, the left one is your computer and the right is the server. Simple drag the folder that you want to download from server to your computer and it will automatically download whatever is in the directory.

[ Download FileZilla ]

[tags]download, downthemall, flashgot, directory, folder[/tags]