Downloading Media from WordPress using AppleScript

I got a request from a teacher who wanted to download a years worth of images from a Glow Blog (for end of year slideshow).

Although there are plugins that can do this these are not available on Glow Blogs. I was stumped apart from going through the site and downloading them 1 by 1. But after a wee bit of thinking I though I’d try using the REST API via AppleScript.

The REST API will list in JSON format the media:

http://johnjohnston.info/blog/wp-json/wp/v2/media/

Look at that in FireFox for a pretty view.

JSON Helper is

an agent (or scriptable background application) which allows you to do useful things with JSON directly from AppleScript.

So I can grab the list of media from a site in JSON format use appleScript to download all the files.

The script I wrote is not great, you can’t download from a particular year, but a quick look at the JSON will help in working out how many files to download.

I am sure there are more efficient ways to do this and I’ve only tested on a couple of site, but it seems to do the trick and might be useful again sometime.


	–needs json helper for apple script Free from mac app store
	–https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/json-helper-for-applescript/id453114608?mt=12

	set downloadfolder to POSIX path of (choose folder with prompt "Please select an output folder:")
	set pagecountstart to 1
	set pagecountmax to 1
	set perpage to 10 –MAX =100
	set blogurl to "FILL-IN-THE-URL"


	if blogurl = "FILL-IN-THE-URL" then
	display dialog "You need to edit the script to fill in a url" buttons "OK" default button "OK"
	return false
	end if

	–We could also limit media to a particular type
	–http://v2.wp-api.org/reference/media/
	–Or filter in various ways
	repeat with pagecount from pagecountstart to pagecountmax

	tell application "JSON Helper"
	set bURL to blogurl & "/wp-json/wp/v2/media/?per_page=" & perpage & "&page=" & pagecount
	set thejson to fetch JSON from bURL

	set theimgs to {}
	set imageCount to count of thejson
	repeat with n from 1 to imageCount
	set end of theimgs to source_url of item n of thejson
	end repeat
	end tell

	repeat with img in theimgs
	set cmd to "curl -L " & img & " > " & downloadfolder & filenamefromurl(img)
	do shell script cmd
	end repeat
	end repeat

	on filenamefromurl(theurl)

	set s to "url=\"" & theurl & "\"; echo \"${url##*/}\""

	return do shell script s
	end filenamefromurl