How to download all images from Gmail messages?

Question

I have a huge number of e-mail messages saved in Gmail with single image (snapshot.jpg, ~500Kb each) attachments. Some messages are combined into e-mail chains (but not all of them due to e-mail chain limit of 100 messages). Now I want to download all attachments from such messages.

I've tried to Forward All messages and then send a message to myself, but it doesn't work since the final size of the message is higher than 25 Mb.

I've also tried to get image links through Google Chrome console (like $('.vI').src), but it returns just one image link.

Is there any other way to download all images from the messages with a particular subject?

I use Google Chrome on OSX.

Answer 1

I think what you are looking for is Attachment Extractor (Thunderbird Plugin). This however requires that you use Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a free Mozilla email client that will also work with Gmail. This plugin will allow you to take all your files that are in your GMail account, grab all the attachments (even filtered like... all jpg files and gifs) and save them off. As the site states...

Awesome free email services like Gmail have made it possible to exchange multiple emails with attachments (almost) without the fear of exceeding the storage space. As a result, we have lots of important files and documents saved online in our inboxes.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/extract-download-multiple-email-attachments-bulk/

Hope this helps

Answer 2

I ran into a similar problem when one of my clients sent me a ton of embedded images instead of attaching them.

I didn't find anything that did not require a separate mail client so I simply wrote a little Google Script that consolidates all the attachments of your starred thread into a zip file then saves this zip file to your Google Drive.

I've explained the script in this post.

I'm also posting the instructions below:

1. Star the threads/conversations in your Gmail whose attachments you want to be saved.
2. Run the script by clicking this link.
3. After you click the link, sign in to Google (if you haven’t already done so) and give it permissions to access Gmail. It will get the attachments from a maximum of ten starred threads and create a zipped file named downloadAttachments.zip that will be placed in the root folder of your Google Drive.

Answer 3

I have not found a way to download all of the images in a conversation, but on Gmail there is a little button to the right and a little above the attachments. It is of an arrow and if you hover above it it says, "Download all attachments." It only downloads the images of that message (about 17-20), but it's much quicker than downloading the images individually.

Answer 4

There is no longer a "Download all images" button (at least in 2023). Now the simplest way is to:

1. From Gmail, open the email in new window.

2. Ensure your images are displayed. Right click towards the edge of the email page (not on the images) and Save as.. or Ctrl-S. Save the Complete webpage to a local folder.

4. Open up the downloaded folder in your file explorer and order by size. You should see all your images.

Answer 5

What worked for me: In Gmail, click the three little dots on the right and choose "download message". It will save it as a .eml file. I opened that file with the mail app on my Mac. From there, I could save all the attachments at once.

Answer 6

This link takes you to the email downloader which is a program that allows you to connect to different mail exchanges and download all of the attachments into a folder

https://gearmage.com/maildownloader.html

Answer 7

I had similar issue of a client sending images as embbeded instead of attached, around 222 images. I was able to do a workaround since images are stored in img tag in the HTML DOM. Run the below script in google chrome console and it shall return all the image source's links as an array.

>var imgs = document.getElementsByTagName("img");
 var imgSrcs = [];
 for (var i = 0; i < imgs.length; i++) {
     imgSrcs.push(imgs[i].src);
    }

>imgSrcs

Recommended to open the inspect tab in google chrome and add id attribute to the div tag that has the images beneath it. and replace the img var with the below:

 var imgs = document.getElementById('imgs_div').getElementsByTagName("img");

Hope it helped :)