How to download full-size images instead of thumbnails
Short answer
Gallery pages display a downscaled copy and keep the full-size file behind a link or in a list of responsive sources. Saving straight from the grid therefore gives you the preview. The fix has two halves: collect the images the page actually loaded, including the ones sitting behind links, then filter by width so the small copies drop out before anything is downloaded.
Doing it by hand
Click a thumbnail to open the full view, wait for the large file to load, then right-click and save it — repeated for every image.
When there is no full view, the fallback is to open developer tools, find the request in the Network tab and save the file from there.
Where that falls apart
- Nothing on the page tells you which copy you are looking at, so it is easy to save a 300px preview believing it is the original.
- Responsive images ship several sizes of the same photo at once, and the browser hands the context menu whichever one it decided to render for your screen.
- Opening every image in its full view doubles the number of page loads before you have saved a single file.
- The pattern that turns a preview URL into an original one differs from site to site, so editing URLs by hand stops working the moment you change sites.
Doing it with ImgDown
Step 1
Scan the page
Open the image list from the toolbar icon. Alongside the images the page displays, the extension picks up images that are linked from thumbnails — which is usually where the full-size file lives.
Step 2
Set a minimum width
Drag the width filter up to somewhere around 800px. Every preview copy narrower than that disappears from the list, and what remains is the set worth saving.
Step 3
Sort by resolution
Switch the sort order to largest first. When a site publishes the same photo in several sizes, the original now sits at the top of the list and the variants below it are easy to leave out.
Step 4
Check the dimensions, then download
Every thumbnail carries its real pixel size, so a glance is enough to confirm you are about to save originals. Files are written byte-for-byte as the site serves them, with no re-encoding.
Related questions
Try it on the page you have open
Free, no account, and it works on the next gallery you open.