Download IF URL: Contains, Not Contains, and Regex

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Filtering without editing your list

Scraped URL lists are rarely clean. A single pull might mix product photos with icons, tracking pixels, sprites, and widget graphics. The old way to deal with that is to manually prune the list before downloading — tedious, and you lose the original if you change your mind. Download IF URL in Bulk Image Downloader From URL List takes a smarter approach: it filters at download time and leaves your list untouched.

How the condition test works

Enable Download IF URL on a task and you define one or more conditions. When the task runs, every URL is tested against those conditions before anything downloads. The flow is clean and predictable:

  • Your URL list stays exactly as you pasted it — nothing is deleted.
  • At download, each URL is checked against your conditions.
  • If a URL fails, it is simply skipped — not downloaded, and not counted as a failure in the report.
  • If it passes, it flows into the download pipeline like normal.

That “skipped, not failed” detail matters. A filtered-out URL is a deliberate exclusion, so your download report stays meaningful — failures mean actual problems, not links you intended to drop.

The three condition types

You build conditions from three matching modes, each suited to a different situation:

  • Contains — the URL must include a piece of text you specify. Use it to keep only links from a certain path or with a certain keyword, like a folder name or a size indicator.
  • Not Contains — the URL must not include your text. This is the one for excluding junk: thumbnails, icons, ad domains, anything carrying a tell-tale string you want gone.
  • Regex — full pattern matching for when simple text is not enough. If you need to match a structured pattern — specific extensions, ID formats, or particular path shapes — regex gives you the precision power users expect.

For most lists, Contains and Not Contains do the heavy lifting. Regex is there for the cases where you need to express something more exact than a substring.

A practical example

Say you scraped a product page and your list has full-size product shots mixed with tiny UI icons. The product images live under a /products/ path and the icons under /assets/icons/. A single Contains condition on “/products/” keeps the shots you want; a Not Contains condition on “/icons/” pushes the junk out. Either way, your source list is preserved — if you later want the icons too, the URLs are still right there.

Where it fits in the pipeline

Download IF URL pairs naturally with the file type filters in your download settings. Think of it as a two-stage gate: URL logic decides which links are eligible, then the format filter decides which file types among them actually save. URL first, format second. The result is that a messy, mixed list becomes a precise download without you ever editing the list itself — keep the source intact for future tweaks, and let the conditions decide what comes through each run.