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Getting started
Let us in a few steps have a look at the key features of GrabJPG. We'll skip the more enhanced features for now and concentrate on the main things. If you know your way around a bit the rest will also be easy to understand.
The search bar
Let's search for images on the web. In the program you see the search bar. Now, for our first use we want to perform just a simple search of something of which we expect to find a lot and a lot of images. So click on the search bar - or press F3 - and type a keyword. For example type the word sunset.
You see a dialog coming up, in that you can set some extra filtering options. For now, ignore it. Click the button Finish on the bottom. You'll see a new page opening. Pretty soon filled with images that show sunsets or are related to sunsets.
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Here a part of the screen simular to the one you got. GrabJPG found pictures and presents them.
We have marked four parts on this screen, at the left the menu and the tabcontrol and at the right the toolbuttons and the gallery control.
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Full screen
Before we gonna talk about the things we marked on the screen, double click one of the images. As you see the image immediatly opens full screen. All images GrabJPG shows are already available for viewing with no delay. With the arrow keys (left and right) you can move from one image to another. Double click the image again to close the full screen.
The menu
As almost any other program GrabJPG has a menu-bar in top. Here you can select an action by clicking on it. Nothing new in that, still we want to say something about it.
Sometimes you want to do something, you know the program can do it but you have no idea where to look. That is why, although there are buttons, controls and popup menu's everywhere to make your life easy, we have made sure that every single feature is also available in the menu. If it isn't in the menu, we ain't having it. So here you have an overview about what's possible.
Another thing is the shortcut keys. Every feature of the program is available pressing a single key or key-combination. You want to go to your collections, you want to save a image in your search. Can be done by right-clicking it and clicking "Save" but also by pressing CTRL+S. The menu shows which key-combination does what.
The tab control
The tab control shows you the open pages. For each search and grab - we come to what a grab is soon - you see one page. Two extra pages are open, home and collections. Click one to see that page.
You'll do most of your manouvring with the tab control. A few hints to make that as easy as possible:
- You can use the shortcuts CTRL+W and SHIFT+W to go to the next or previous page.
- All available pages (currently visible or not) are listed in the menu view and under the view tool button.
- You can drag and drop pages to change the order. Select one, keep the mouse button down, and move it.
- GrabJPG isn't limited to one window. You can open more.
Open a window with the new window button
at the right side of your screen. The currently selected page opens in a new window. With drag-and-drop you can move pages from one to another window.
The tool buttons
Three buttons that give you access to the most used functions.
- The View button shows all available pages. Select one to open it.
- The Grab button shows fuctions available within the current page.
- The Image button shows functions available on one image.
There is always one image the selected image (if any availabe). That image has a red line below it to indicate it is selected. Click another one to select that. If you right-click it you'll get the image menu for that image directly.
No good friends with your mouse? Use the arrow keys to go from one image to another.
The gallery control
In the default configuration there are fitting 16 images on your screen. Within a short time you'll have much more than that. They are put in galleries. With the gallery control you can move to another gallery. The keys PgUp en PgDn will also do the work.
Closing up again
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As we searched for sunset images you can pretty much for about anything. Just type the words and the program start searching. Pretty much you have a lot of searches running. Available resources are devided amongst the running grabs and searches so you cannot start countless of them.
Cancel a search or grab when you are finished with it. Do so with the cancel button. The little blue close button on the right above corner is something else: It closes the page but lets the grab or search running.
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Creating a grab
The difference between a seach and a grab is that a search needs keywords and searches the web for related images. A grab needs a website (an URL) and takes all images of that site. Grabs can be configured to only take a few pages, take a few sites etc but for now lets assume they take one website at a time. The grab scans that site for JPG images and gets them for you.
While a search is a very easy way to get images a grab is often much more powerfull. Many images will never be found by searches but will be found by a grab. Searches depend on name and context of an image. Many images are named 001.JPG, 002.JPG etcetera, with no description. The grab finds them, the search not.
Let's go in outer space. Type www.nasa.gov in the search bar, click the Go button or press enter. Again you are asked for specifications, for now ignore and press the finish button.
You just ordered your computer to search the entire nasa website for images but skipping the very small images. It is an enourmous site, you'll see the grab getting started up a bit slower than previous search but within a minute it is a top speed and pictures will come in rader rapidly. If you let it continue grabbing within an hour or so you will have thousands of images of space ships, stars, planets and astronauts.
Your results are presented in a gallery that is identical to the one of a search.
Now all you need to do is find interesting sites to grab. You can use your webbrowser and google but also GrabJPG provides functions to use the search to find interesting sites to grab. For now we are on a page called "Getting started" so it goes a bit to deep to go into it.
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The collections
Select an image in a search or grab and press CTRL+S. On the statusbar you see a message that the image was saved. Go to your collections to see where it was saved. In the collections you can view images in at least one folder on your hard disk but you can add more images. Again you see a gallery that functions on the same way as we have seen in grabs and searches. You can add as many folders as you want to the collections.
The save didn't prompt for any folder name or file name. When we started the search and later the grab we skipped the options by just pressing finish. In that options you could choose a folder where all images that you save will be saved. Click the edit button in the lower left corner to change it to something else.
Besides save we also have Save In to get images from your grabs/searches to your collections. The difference is that save in lets you choose a folder.
Finally in the Grab menu you see save all. It prompts for a folder and then saves them all.
What's next
We have had a look at GrabJPG's main features. The program has much more but we think you can get started with this. Use the program itself to find what you are looking for and learn more about its abilities. You can also continue reading in one of the other chapters of this site.
If you use the free version, after 15 days, the fun will be over. Or, uhh,
here is a suggestion.
GrabJPG is activly being developed. The way you control the program will not change much but we keep it up to date with latest developments in search engines, adding new possibilities and keep the program up to date. At the tools menu you have the item "Check for new version", getting in every once and a while the latest version assures you from benefiting from that work. Updates are free of charge.
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