How to bulk download photos and videos from social media

Saving one photo is easy: open it, right-click or long-press, save. Saving an album of four hundred that way is an afternoon of clicking, misnamed files, and losing track of where you stopped. Past a dozen files, you want a queue, not a context menu.

The usual routes, and what's wrong with them

Paste-a-link download sites ask you to feed URLs to someone else's server one at a time — slow in exactly the way you're trying to fix, and your browsing goes through a third party you know nothing about.

Desktop apps that promise bulk downloads typically want your account credentials so they can log in as you. Handing your password to an unknown binary is a bad trade for saved clicks.

A browser extension avoids both problems: it runs inside the session you already have, needs no separate login, and saves files straight to your own Downloads folder.

Bulk downloading with the extension

Bulk Social Media Downloader works on most major social platforms and is built around exactly this job. The flow:

• Open the collection — an album, a profile's media, a gallery. When the extension detects something downloadable, a floating download button appears; a command palette (⌘K / Ctrl+K) offers the same actions from the keyboard.
• Pick what to grab. Single items have a download button right next to the media; collections get a bulk action that walks the whole set, page by page, so you don't have to scroll it into view yourself.
• Let the queue work. Downloads run through a visible queue that resumes after interruptions and skips files it has already saved, so a dropped connection doesn't mean starting over.
• Get usable files. Videos are saved in the best quality available — when a platform stores audio and video separately, the two are merged on your device — and filename and folder rules keep four hundred files organized instead of dumped in one pile.

Everything happens locally: no account with us, no server of ours in the middle, no analytics. The files go from your browser to your disk, full stop.

Download responsibly

A downloader saves what you can already see; it doesn't change what you're allowed to keep. Stick to your own content and content you have the right to save, respect each platform's terms of service, and treat other people's work as copyrighted — because it is.