Automatically importing images when copy-paste from a web page

[desk7]

When I copy some pieces of a web page and paste them into Sigil, even if I don't paste it as simple text, images are not visible and there are placeholders instead.
Is it possible to add the feature to automatically import images and add them to Images folder?

[DiapDealer]

That's a pretty tall order. When copying web content, there's almost never any actual images in the mimedata contained in the clipboard. There's merely urls. So Sigil would need to intercept all paste signals, parse the clipboard's mimedata for urls, determine which urls are images, download those images to Sigil's scratch/Images directory, and finally update the urls in the clipboard's mimedata with the new local filepath. That's a lot of effort when web content can often be easily saved locally and then imported.

[desk7]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

That's a pretty tall order. When copying web content, there's almost never any actual images in the mimedata contained in the clipboard. There's merely urls. So Sigil would need to intercept all paste signals, parse the clipboard's mimedata for urls, determine which urls are images, download those images to Sigil's scratch/Images directory, and finally update the urls in the clipboard's mimedata with the new local filepath. That's a lot of effort when web content can often be easily saved locally and then imported.

You're right but when you import saved html webpages, then you have to manually remove banners etc.
That's why I asked for that solution

[KevinH]

I really do not think we want Sigil in the web slurping business. It seems to me you can use many other pieces of software (curl etc) to download a website and then import it getting all of the images and pieces. Open that slurped site and select what you want to import into Sigil.

If you want to automate that process,then a custom plugin would be your best bet.

Originally Posted by desk7

You're right but when you import saved html webpages, then you have to manually remove banners etc.
That's why I asked for that solution

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by desk7

You're right but when you import saved html webpages, then you have to manually remove banners etc.
That's why I asked for that solution

There are a browser extensions that all allow you to save websites as epubs. For example, dotepub and GrabMyBooks.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by KevinH

I really do not think we want Sigil in the web slurping business. It seems to me you can use many other pieces of software (curl etc) to download a website and then import it getting all of the images and pieces. Open that slurped site and select what you want to import into Sigil.

If you want to automate that process,then a custom plugin would be your best bet.

I tend to agree. I don't really want Sigil trying to connect to websites (not to mention downloading files) when pasting content copied from the web.

If someone doesn't want the whole page or site, another workaround is to paste the copied content into Word. It will download images when pasting. That can then be exported and imported into Sigil in numerous ways.

[desk7]

Originally Posted by KevinH

I really do not think we want Sigil in the web slurping business. It seems to me you can use many other pieces of software (curl etc) to download a website and then import it getting all of the images and pieces. Open that slurped site and select what you want to import into Sigil.

If you want to automate that process,then a custom plugin would be your best bet.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

There are a browser extensions that all allow you to save websites as epubs. For example, dotepub and GrabMyBooks.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I tend to agree. I don't really want Sigil trying to connect to websites (not to mention downloading files) when pasting content copied from the web.

If someone doesn't want the whole page or site, another workaround is to paste the copied content into Word. It will download images when pasting. That can then be exported and imported into Sigil in numerous ways.

Thank you for your suggestions!