Is it possible to download images from a URL within a powerquery?

[Rhothgar]

Morning,

I had a great day yesterday creating a powerquery to generate 301 redirects for a website changeover.  There was only one thing I couldn't resolve but I ended up doing it manually.  I'll revisit it when I get the chance and probably post up for some real expert advice!

Today's project is this.  I've added a suffix to a column from our webhost to generate a url.

However, I am trying to figure out one or maybe two things.

a) Is it possible to somehow convert that link within the query to a hyperlink so I can have someone sit there and go through the brain-numbing task of downloading every photo manually to our system or,

b) Is it possible to automate this easily so we can simply click "GO!" and cause powerquery to download the images to say, "C:/Users/xxx/Downloads/Image Folder".

Of course, I would simply create the new "Image Folder" in their Downloads folder rather than using code.

If it helps, I have a OneDrive subscription if it would be easier to somehow implement downloads to OneDrive?

I've read some stuff on Stack Overflow which I really didn't understand.

Note entirely sure if it breaches any Community Rules posting a link to that?  If so, could admins please remove link rather than deleting post?

https://stackoverflow.com/a/49282191/23359670 

Thanks in advance.

[lbendlin]

What's your rationale for using Power Query? Wouldn't Powershell or curl be more appropriate?

[Rhothgar]

There is no rationale.  I am not a coder so wouldn't realise there were other options but probably too long in the tooth to try and venture into learning something else too although I am enjoying learning powerquery.

[lbendlin]

You can ingest images via Web.Contents and store them as Base64 strings in your query. You cannot write them to disk with Power Query.

[Rhothgar]

Sounds interesting. 

Do you suggest a particular forum that I should post the question to?

Be good for me to get it cracked in the next day or so. 

[lbendlin]

I said you can. I didn't say you should.

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Storing Large Images In Power BI Datasets (crossjoin.co.uk)

[Rhothgar]

So are you saying that curl is not a good idea either?  I understood you were guiding me towards looking at that instead of powerquery

[lbendlin]

ah, sorry, I thought you were still referring to Power Query.

curl - Tutorial

[Rhothgar]

Hi.

I am finally back on this but timing is really bad now as I need to get all these images downloaded from our website today.

I have an Excel file with all the web addresses in of the images.

Whilst that curl tutorial looks amazing, I simply haven't got 3 hours to watch it in full.

If I save the excel out as a text file with a curl command in front of every web address, would I been able to run that file in powershell and somehow set it to download all images to a set folder on my PC and leave it to do the work.

I do not have FTP access so the web addresses are simple plain web addresses which are accessible by anyone.