ImageStation download software walkthrough

If you have been reading my blog, you should know that Sony's ImageStation web site is closing on Feb 1, 2008. That means the photos and videos hosted by the web site will no longer be available for viewing or download from then on. ImageStation offers a few options for its members to keep their photos available. One of such options is a software that runs on the user's computer to download the originals of all the photos from his/her online albums. I dedicate this post to walkthrough the software.

Software download
Once you sign in the ImageStation web site, you can find a red banner at the top of the page. The link on the banner takes you to the available options for keeping your photos. In particular, you will find the following section:


Click on the "Learn more" link regarding download of full-resolution original photos. You will be sent to a page that lets you download the photo download software according to the operation system that runs on your home computer.


I picked "Windows version" for my computer running Windows Vista. If you use a Mac computer, choose "Macintosh version". Follow the download instructions provided by your web browser.

Software walkthrough
Run the application from where it has been placed. On Windows, you may need to answer to a couple of security warning dialog boxes in order to have the software up and running. Here's the first screen of the software running on Windows Vista. You are prompted to enter your ImageStation user ID and password.


Once you have filled in the information and clicked "Sign in", the software begins to collect information regarding your hosted photos. The screen shows how many albums you have, and how many it has collected information from. The time it takes to complete this step varies by how many photos you have uploaded to the web site. In my case, I had over 300 albums and presumably over 10,000 photos on the web site. It took a few minutes for the step to come to completion.


Once the software is done with collecting photo information, you are told how much disk space is needed to download all your photos. You are also prompted for a location on your local computer to store the photos to be downloaded. You are free to hit "Download" to begin the lengthy download process. Before doing so, you may take a look at the advanced options you are given.


More download options
Clicking at the "Show Advanced Options" checkbox, a host of new options are shown at the bottom of the screen.


The "Organize images into subfolders that match my album titles" option is preselected. Uncheck the option only if you do not want photos to be saved into subfolders corresponding to their albums. I'd not disable this option.

The next option is a bit tricky. The software asks for a prefix for the names of the files to be saved for the photos. Why, you may ask, would I need to care about that? It's at Sony's fault. They claim that once photos have been uploaded to ImageStation, their original file names are removed on the web site. Therefore, the software cannot come up with the original file names for the hosted photos. The software preselects "is_" to be the file name prefix. Yet you can specify a different prefix. I personally think it is a really bad default value. More importantly, I think it is just dumb the way ImageStation handles the file names. When the photos are uploaded, the titles of the photos are by default their original file names. So in case the title of a hosted photo stays unchanged (that is the case for 99% of my photos), the software can correctly reconstruct the local file names of the photos. I will probably make this request to ImageStation afterwards.
You can also find at the bottom of the screen options to specify proxy server information to establish proper network connection to ImageStation. This again I find dumb as this option should be made available on the first screen of the software, it tries to connect to the ImageStation online service.


Conclusion
Well, this software is far from being perfect. But this is the only option you have if you want to get back the originals of your precious memories. A couple more things before I close, I haven't tried proceeding with "Download" yet. That's why I haven't shown you the download progress screen and whatever comes after. Secondly, the way the software asks for a prefix for the local file names suggests to me that the software may not be downloading hosted videos onto the local computer at all! I cannot tell for sure until I attempt the download myself. If you have already tried, please post your findings as comments here. Otherwise, I may create a test ImageStation account (if the web site still takes new registration) and try it out before playing with my eronmous collection of hosted photos and videos. I wonder if it would take days to download them all. That's given the unstable wireless connection my computer uses survives throughout the download!