Thumbnail Galleries

A thumbnail gallery is a web page that consists of 5.10,15,20 etc small images embedded into the page, that each link to the actual pictures of the picture gallery.

Nici downloads thumbnail galleries by firstly downloading the html page. This is usually very quick as it does not download any of the embedded images (such as the thumbnails themselves or navigation, or background images).

Nici then analyzes the html of the page looking for a series (or multiple series) of related pictures. Typically it will find the links to the full size pictures in this phase, ignoring the links to the small embedded images.

It then downloads those links one by one, effectively downloading the full size pictures of the thumbnail gallery, while not wasting your time and bandwidth by downloading the other images (including thumbs and banners)

Types of Thumbnail Galleries

There are two main types of thumbnail galleries on the web:

• The first, which is the most common, is a page of thumbnails which link directly to the full size pictures. For more information on the construction (and an example) of this type of thumbnail gallery, see our thumb gallery grabber article.
• The second is less common. In this type of thumbnail gallery, each thumbnail links to an html web page which contains the full size picture as an embedded image. For more information on the construction (and an example) of this type of gallery, see our image downloader example article.