15-Minute Reviews :: NeoDownloader v2.2

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s review is on NeoDownloader version 2.2 by Neowise Software – An application to aid you in grabbing a variety of filetypes from a website quickly.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Neo Downloader will help you download thousands of pictures, audio and video files quickly and easily.

As you know, there is a lot of websites with tons of pictures, music and movies. And of course, it is a time consuming affair to save every file manually.

But now you can forget about this frustrating process!

Just drag a link from your browser to the program’s Drop Basket and this award-winning tool will scan the entire website and download all media files automatically.

Quick Pros

• Interface is easy to use – Setting up new project is easy
• Dropbox-style object for quick processing
• Built-in preview functionality is very handy
• Can crawl password-protected sites
• A lot of other features to restrict which files are grabbed
• Very fast processing – Does not lock up application while processing
• Limited maximum connections to 10

Quick Cons

• Would have been nice to be able to restrict image download to size range and not just auto-delete
• Could have added file download restrictions based on include/exclude rules as well
• No ‘Open Destination Folder’ button with the other buttons

Expansion

Previously, when I’ve wanted to download a series of files from a site, I’ve resorted to using Download Them All! A FireFox plugin which does a great job in itself. I was curious at how well a standalone application built in this method would do.

The interface is very easy to use. Whole the main window looks a little wild for organization, it is really laid out in a very intelligent method. Along the top is the obligatory button row; The first set of three buttons are for creating, editing and deleting projects. The second set of three buttons is for starting, stopping and resuming a project. Finally, the remainder of the buttons save one is for aiding in previewing, with the last button being the link to Preferences. Below this bar is split into two columns; The right-most being the preview window, and the left is a total of three window areas; The project tree window next to the project files window, and below that is the currently-active queue items. Overall it is very easy to see what is going on, what you need to do and where to go next.

There are two ways of creating a new project; Either through the new project button (or menu option) as well as using the dropbox – A small icon which hovers transparently over all windows in which you can drag and drop a link to get started, or right click for a few other options. When you’ve begun creating a new project, the main interface is a wizard-style layout. In the end however, I’d likely end up going into the ‘Advanced’ settings each time so I’m not quite sure why some if its settings weren’t incorporated into the wizard as well to avoid the more-common extra steps needed.

There are plenty of ways to limit how a site is crawled and what files are grabbed. You can limit scanning to a specified scan depth or go unlimited; You can have the application only scan in the folder structure on the site at and below the level you specified; You can also choose to scan (and download) partially into other sites as well, which would be handy for sites linking to off-site materials; You can limit the download file functionality to 6 different image types (plus an option called ‘All other pictures’), audio files, video files, or even build your own file download type by indicating a list of extensions; There is also filters for ignoring or limiting scans to pages which contain specific keywords, which may be great for those looking to avoid a lot of thumbnails; Finally, you can also limit file download to a minimum and maximum filesize, as well as limit the file download to a minimum resolution.

During my testing, I increased my connections to the maximum of 10 concurrent and tried my favorite desktop wallpaper site, mandolux – I did not turn on the ‘ONLY’ filter because I did want to give it a spin. I thought it would take a long time, but I was surprised. A total of 8382 links/files in about 20 minutes total. Quite impressive. Now, I did mark this in a pro; I am glad the application has chosen to limit the maximum connection to 10; Much more than this could really take sites to their knees quickly (And really, I do question the use of it on a regular basis.) My biggest quirk here is that there isn’t STRONGER filters for what is downloaded, file-wise. I would normally feel uncomfortable with using this application regularly just because I feel the filters aren’t quite as strong as I would hope and I would feel that the bandwidth used normally would be likely quite excessive for just burning on files that will be auto- or manually- deleted because the filters weren’t quite strong enough.

The first part I feel would be important to this application is not only including a maximum image resolution (For use for those looking to get a specific desktop size) but as well as figure out some method in which the image could be checked before the entire file is downloaded, to minimize the bandwidth used on the receiving end and increase your speed. Secondly, I feel that there should be more than just URL filters; Granted, they in themselves are powerful, but if there would be file include/exclude rules as well, it’d be great. I know with mandolux that I only want images that are 1680 and above; I could manually filter out all the non-1680 by doing 1024, 1152, 1280, 1440, 1600, 1680, 1920 and 2560, but it would have been much easier to have had another area to enter filters that work on the file name only, and then have it only download files which possess ‘1680’ in its name, saving both myself time, and other sites bandwidth. Granted, this will not be the case for many sites, and as thus I mentioned the resolution feature should be improved as well.

Final Verdict

While this application does what it is supposed to do, and does it quite well, I do feel that it needs a lot more maturing on the filter end of thing. The question with me of ‘should you use this?’ does come up as well, due to the fact that with the filters being lax, you’re really burning a lot of bandwidth unnecessarily, both on your end and the receiving end (Bandwidth costs money at some point). For free, this tool is very powerful and is worthwhile a download if you do need to download files from a site. As for paying $39.95, this is a great tool, but unless you download a lot from sites, this price tag for an ‘occasional’ use application may be a tad high.

Posted by BladedThoth on Thursday, October 04, 2007