Grab from Yahoo Groups While you Can ~ Thursday, October 17, 2019

You may have heard that Yahoo Groups is shutting down. Most of my old favorite groups have been pretty quiet for a while now. Facebook Groups seem to have taken over the function of hosting online interest groups, although I never get the sense of an online club from them that niche email groups used to have. But, here is a more practical question: is there a convenient way to grab all the files that people have uploaded to Yahoo Groups over the years? If you want to grab them one by one, you better get busy, because there's not much time left. However, I think I've found a better way.

• Use Firefox. You should use it anyway because it's the best!
• Install the add-on Simple Mass Downloader.
• Clear out the Downloads folder on your computer, so that you can distinguish all the files you're about to download from other ones that might've been sitting around.
• Navigate to the Files page for a Yahoo Group; go to a URL like: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/carplandrawings/files
• You'll see something like this:
  
• If there are subfolders, navigate to each one one at a time, and for each, do the following steps (it'd be nice if you could grab all subfolders at once, but I haven't figured out a way yet).
• Click the Simple Mass Downloader button in the upper right corner of your window--the down-facing blue arrow in a square.
• Click on the Resources tab, and select files to download.
• Click on the downward blue arrow in the lower right corner of the Simple Mass Downloader control window.
• They will all end up in you usual download folder. Copy them somewhere.
• You can also go to the Photos tab and download pics too. I don't think you need to go to all the albums individually--unlike with Files, photos all seem to be available at the top level.
• You may seem to get a lot of apparent duplicate downloads. But I generally find that with pictures, one version is the actual picture and one won't open (it's probably just some wrapper web page stuff).
• Go to the next group you want, and repeat.