I'm considering automating a manual process I have in Firefox by developing a browser extension, even though I've never created one before. As a software developer (but not specifically a web developer), I'm curious about the difficulty of this task and where I should start.
Let me explain my situation: there's a website I browse that includes images that I often want to save. The images are not easily accessible—most existing image downloader extensions I've tried are either overly complicated or don't work correctly for this specific case.
Instead, I currently have to open the Firefox developer tools, look for the largest GET responses under the 'network' tab, and manually save them. While that works, it's not very efficient.
I would like an extension that, when I find an image I want, I can just click a button to save the latest relevant image along with useful context like the image URL and any associated text or captions, automatically into a file or as metadata. I'm not looking to automate the search process—just to simplify saving the files I want with additional context.
If you have any thoughts or advice about how to get started with this or if there's already an existing tool that meets my needs, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks a lot!
1 Answer
Hey! It sounds like you've got a fun project on your hands. One thing you may find helpful is using the Firefox developer tools to see all the requests you’re making. You can sort them by different types like image or media and save those manually, but I get that's not what you want. If you can automate that process a little, I'd say it’s definitely doable, but it might take some learning since you've never made an extension before.
Thanks for the input! I know about the devtools but I'm aiming for something that includes context automatically, not just manually saving.