How to Download Images from Issuu

Though Scribd seems to be the preferred place for sharing documents online, Issuu has a much better media viewer. And like Scribd it has some disadvantages (some intentional). Direct linking to a page is a bit tricky, though you can extract the URL changing the options for generating the embed code. And since the viewers are in flash downloading the images (you can easily download PDFs if it is not disabled, even if it is you can) are a bit tricky. You could get them from the browser cache, but that process is a bit tedious.

Now you might ask, why would you need an image of a magazine page or a document? For the same reason you need to download an YouTube video?

Thankfully in Issuu it isn’t very difficult and I’ve made it a little easier. If you need to download or link to a particular page of a document hosted on Issuu, all that you need to do is insert the document ID and the page number in this form (the first two fields) and the URL of the image would automatically appear on the third field. Copy it and paste the URL wherever you want to.

Issuu Image Download Tool

Where do you find the Document ID? If you are using Firefox/Chrome, press Ctrl+U (or go to View » Page Source) to view the source code of the page (in IE you should find in the Page dropdown). Then do a Crtl+F and search for documentId. You’ll find something like this:


“documentId” : “090409124522-f5d6aed3b38548dcab8257cbf6487852”,


Copy the ID (minus the quotes) and paste it to the first field in the form below:


The JPG files on Issuu are stored in this structure:


http://image.issuu.com/Document_ID/jpg/page_Page_Number.jpg


So if you don’t want to use the tool, you can modify the URL yourself.

Easy, isn’t it? (Atleast till the time they don’t go about making changes).