Download media
We can use the download URLs that we assembled in the step above to go and download each media file. For clarity, we will place files in two different folders, based on whether we downloaded them from the iDigBio server or an external server. We will name each file based on its unique identifier.
# Create new directories to save media files in
dir.create("jpgs_idigbio")
dir.create("jpgs_external")
# Assemble another vector of file paths to use when saving media downloaded
# from iDigBio
mediapath_idigbio <- paste("jpgs_idigbio/", records$uuid, ".jpg", sep = "")
# Assemble another vector of file paths to use when saving media downloaded
# from external servers; please note that it's probably not a great idea to
# assume these files are all jpgs, as we're doing here...
mediapath_external <- paste("jpgs_external/", records$uuid, ".jpg", sep = "")
# Add a check to deal with URLs that are broken links
possibly_download.file = purrr::possibly(download.file,
otherwise = "cannot download")
#"mode" argument (="wb") in the walk function to download.file.
# Iterate through the action of downloading whatever file is at each
# iDigBio URL
purrr::walk2(.x = mediaurl_idigbio,
.y = mediapath_idigbio, possibly_download.file)
# Iterate through the action of downloading whatever file is at each
# external URL
purrr::walk2(.x = mediaurl_external,
.y = mediapath_external, possibly_download.file)You should now have two folders, each with ten images downloaded from
iDigBio and external servers, respectively. Note that we only downloaded
ten images here for brevity’s sake, but you can increase this using the
limit argument in the first step. Here is an example of one
of the images we downloaded:
[1] “
”