There is a security hole in SmugMug, discovered by Google Blogoscoped which allows you to view or even download private albums. SmugMug users can protect photos from public view by selecting private option, one would expect these won’t be viewable by public. But that is not the case, any one can view these photos by just guessing the URL of the photos. Ofcourse one can password protect but that is a different issue. Read the discussion at Google Blogoscoped for more on this

Smugmug stores all site photos in one directory /photos/ and for individual images uses numeric-M.jpg as URL, for ex: http://www.smumug.com/photos/1000-M.jpg, so any one can download these images. But downloading one image at a time is painful.

Batch Download is a Firefox extension that helps you to batch download images from sites like Smugmug. Here batch means we are talking of 1000s of images. If you remember recently someone downloaded private photos from Myspace and uploaded it to torrent site, this file of 17GB is there at Pirate Bay.

Install the Firefox extension, after installation restart Firefox and click on blank space in the browser and right click, then select batch download. Add task for batch download will open, now set the parameters like this. First set the base URl as http://www.smugmug.com/photos/(*)-M.jpg. The (*) here represents the unique number of the image, in this case it is numeric so specify numbers from 1 to 10000.

You will download all the images which exist with any of the above matching URLs from 1 to 10000, i guess you can’t download password protected directories or the images set to external link off in smugmug.

This method is working at the moment for smugmug photos, i am not sure if they allow it in future?.

Using this extension one can download images from other sites who also use a some characters or numerics.

Via Ghacks

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Tags: downloads, Firefox, Firefox Addons, photos