The problem
I had an old PhotoBucket account that I wanted to archive and delete. However, it would take an extremely long time to manually save each photo and recreate any albums’ folder structure.
The research
PhotoBucket allows copying direct image links, and it also allows copying multiple links at the same time. This is used to obtain a list of all photo direct URLs, which can be saved in a text file and read by a script.
Additionally, direct URLs maintain the folder and file names, so the path structure can be saved directly using Python’s Path library.
The solution
See my source code here: https://github.com/trwnh/PhotoBucketGrabber
Limitations:
- The prefix to be stripped is hardcoded, because it will always be the same for an account.
- There is no way to programmatically obtain a list of all photos or albums from Photobucket, as far as I know, so the selection step is still manual. I think for a one-time task, this is probably not an issue, as it would take more time to attempt to code a solution than it would to simply select all photos from the web dashboard.