Google-chrome – How to download a file from a URL

downloadgoogle-chromehtml

But let's say I have a URL, and it's either a SWF, a PNG or an MP3 or something. How can I force my browser (in this case I'm using Google Chrome) to download the file, instead of automatically displaying/playing it?

My quirky way around this is to create a one line HTML file with a hyperlink inside it pointing to the URL, then right click and save link as. But there has to be a better way to do this. I just can't find it by Googling.

Best Answer

Download File from URL

There are a couple ways to do this. As mentioned, using the developer tools could work (more likely it will give you the url to the file) and right-clicking the link will work. Alternatively there are these options.

In Chrome

Go to the URL
Right-click the webpage
Select Save As...

For verification purposes, here are png, jpg, and mp3 links. Follow them and try these steps. However, in my experience. If you already have a url to a file, opening up Chrome and following these steps is rather tedious so here is an alternative.

In Command Line

Open your favorite terminal emulator
type curl -o myfile.mp3 'www.foo.com/bar.mp3'

Where myfile.mp3 is what you want to call the file you're downloading
And www.foo.com/bar.mp3 is the URL to the file

[Note: This works for Linux and Mac users. If you are unfortunate enough to be a Windows user trying to use the cmd line, use Cmder and this method will work or if you're a purist try this]

Related Solutions

Chrome – Download arbitrary file with Google Chrome

Right click the link and click "Save Link As..."

EDIT: To follow up on the need to download arbitrarily from clipboard, I would just create a generic HTML file and use the above solution. Save as mylink.html to file system somewhere. Open in Chrome.

<html>
<a href="http://www.mycompany.com/secretvideo.mp4">Link</a>
</html>

Google-chrome – Make Chrome always open PDFs itself

The "Redirector" answer was just what I was looking for, but that extension is no longer available. So I kept digging and found Modify Content-Type. It's working as I expected (PDFs open in the internal viewer despite Content-Disposition: attachment in the response headers) with a rule of:

URL Filter:       .*
Original Type:    application/.*pdf
Replacement Type: application/pdf
Disposition:      inline

Note well that this may expose you to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, and you would be wise not to allow .* in the URL filter. Add to it only as needed.