Downloading all files from Adobe Creative Cloud share

What I learned today — 3 May 2018

Photo by Guilherme Vasconcelos on Unsplash

If you’ve received a link to Adobe Creative Cloud shared assets you may want to download all the files, but unfortunately the user interface does not facilitate this. Instead you have to download each file individually. In this post I’ll show how to use the command line utilities curl, jq, xargs and wget to download all the files in a share.

Get the folder ID using your browser’s Network Tab

The first step is the most manual and requires using your browser’s developer tools.

1. Open a new tab and open the developer tools. In Firefox or Chrome simply press F12 and switch to the Network tab
2. Put the share URL in the address bar, for example “https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/59698c21-c010-4718-78fb-0b5346a5200d”
3. Filter the list of requests using “adobecc”
4. Look for the request with a file name like “1EFWSGP1VVZDNJIMGZR4T2EWJCEFFF”. This is the folder ID for the share

Download all the files in the share on the command line

1. Change directory to the location where you wish to download the files. For example:

mkdir -p ~/Pictures/Icons
cd ~/Pictures/Icons

2. Export the folder ID as environment variable:

export FOLDER_ID=1EFWSGP1VVZDNJIMGZR4T2EWJCEFFF

3. Download the files in the share:

curl https://public.adobecc.com/files/${FOLDER_ID} | jq '.children[] | "https://public.adobecc.com/files/\(env.FOLDER_ID)/\(.name)"' | xargs wget

What’s happening?

• curl fetches a JSON response describing the directory
• jq parses the JSON, selects the array of files, called “children”, and outputs a line like “https://public.adobecc.com/files/1EFWSGP1VVZDNJIMGZR4T2EWJCEFFF/All Icons.zip” for each file by replacing the FOLDER_ID variable and the “name” attribute
• xargs supplies the entire output of jq to wget
• wget downloads each of the files