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Online help pages for the Nici Picture Downloader for Windows 98,ME,2000,XP and 2003.

These pages are extracted from Nici's help system and require Internet Explorer v5.0 or later.

Certain interactive commands are not available in the online version.

Help Pages

Help
Overview of Nici
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Add New Page Window
Nici-Quick vs Crawl Strategies
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Downloading Pages
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Downloading Movies
My Archives
Last Picture
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Download Report
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Glossary
Crawl Settings

When you use the Crawl {Crawl downloading is the backup download strategy. Unlike the the Nici-Quick download strategy, Crawl downloading systematically downloads and searches through all links. Before starting a Crawl download, a number of parameters need to be chosen.Show more help for this topic More } download strategy, you need to enter a number of settings. The best settings for a particular page {A page starts as a url address of a web-page and is listed on the left-hand side of the Nici window. When a page is first added, it is classified as a waiting page, then as a downloading page, then as a finished page. The Nici-Quick strategy further classifies a finished page as either a picture page or directory page depending on what it contains. Show more help for this topic More } require a knowledge of the structure of that web-page.

For example, A typical home web-site may have a "front" web-page which links to 5 other web-pages, say; "Recipes", "Guestbook", "Holiday Snapshots", "About me" and "Links". Assuming the "Holiday Snapshots" web-page contains 10 images that you want to download;

The danger of Crawl downloading is that if you used a Link depth of 1 level deep and images on a web-page containing 1000s of links, you could be waiting a very long time for it to finish, and can easily find that you have spent that time downloading a lot of junk pictures.

Using Crawl downloading

By default, Nici uses the Nici-Quick {Nici-Quick is the default download strategy. It quickly and efficiently downloads, and classifies pages as either Picture pages or Directory pages. Nici also offers the Crawl download strategy which can be used if Nici-Quick does not correctly handle the page. Show more help for this topic More } download strategy. If a page using Nici-Quick {Nici-Quick is the default download strategy. It quickly and efficiently downloads, and classifies pages as either Picture pages or Directory pages. Nici also offers the Crawl download strategy which can be used if Nici-Quick does not correctly handle the page. Show more help for this topic More } has finished downloading without finding any pictures, you can right-click on the page to open its menu, and then click Crawl Download More...

You can also specify to use Crawl downloading initially in the Add New Page Window. Click on the File menu, then click on New Page...

 Add a page by entering its web-address Open Add New Page Window

Depth

Choose the depth to crawl. If you go deeper than images only, you should consider enabling the Guard to Dont follow links to other hosts.

Guards

Dont follow links to other hosts. If enabled, this stops Nici from crawling to other hosts. Nici will only follow links to the same host as the html document's url.

Dont follow redirections. If enabled, this stops Nici from following http 300 response redirections.

Max/Min Image and html size. This sets limits on the size of both images and html documents that Nici will download. Enter the sizes in kilobytes (entering 2 for Min Image size would not download any images less than 2048 bytes)

Download Movies. If enabled, Nici will download any movies it finds and save them to your Movie Folder.

Safety

Use the Download ceiling to place a cap on the number of downloads that Nici does as part of the crawl.

Notes

If a Crawl download is taking too long, use Skip Page to stop it.

You can Crawl download the same page more than once. Nici remembers the previous crawls and can continue the same crawl, or with new settings.