Downloads Preferences

Downloads options are simple. Except that part of it is pretty complicated. By which I mean you can just set a pretty generic “Download everything into one folder” option or get a lot more specific.

The simple part is where you can define a default download directory. This is where Opera will assume you want to save files for regular or Quick Downloads.

The slightly more complicated part is the MIME types. To make a long and technically tedious story short, whenever you go to a website and request a file (web page, image, MP3, etc), the website tells the browser (Opera) what kind of file it is through something called a MIME type.

The only reason for the average user to possibly care about this is because you can tell Opera to respond to certain MIME types in certain ways. Which is to say: you can tell Opera to always download a certain type of file (for example, an MP3) into a specific folder. And I will explain how using a real life example from my own Opera usage.

I recently signed up as a subscriber to Salon.com after reading about all the free music available to Salon.com members. I had a special folder where I wanted to save these, but I didn’t want to have to tell Opera every single time, and I didn’t want to change my default directory for all downloads. So I used this feature to tell Opera where to put MP3 files. Here’s how.

Of course I first went to the Downloads preferences window, which looked like this:

Then I typed “mp3” into the “Quick Find” box, and saw that the corresponding type was “audio/mpeg”. (Note: I also made sure to UN-check the box which says Hide File Types Opened By Opera):

Note: notice the box next to “Hide file types opened by Opera” is not checked.

I double-clicked on the “audio/mpeg mp3,mp2,mpga” line and a new window appeared. I selected the radio button for ‘Save to disk’ and then checked the box for “Do not ask for folder but save directly to” and then chose the folder where I wanted them to go. The end result looked like this:

Now whenever I click on an MP3, it automatically gets sent to that folder.

I hate it when PDF files are shown in the browser window. I prefer to download them and read them with the viewer of my choice. You can do the same for PDF files using the same method described for MP3s.

As you can see there are other options available to you as well (have the file opened by the default application, or another application; or have the file opened when the download completes, etc), but this should cover the most common usage. It’s not quite a download manager (which is a frequently requested feature) but it is very powerful and can save you a lot of time if you download a lot of a certain type of file (MP3s or PDFs or PowerPoint, etc).

Two minor notes: 1) if the website is misconfigured and does not send the proper MIME type, Opera will try to make an educated guess. But if it doesn’t work on a specific server, it is probably misconfigured. If it doesn’t work on any servers, check to make sure you chose the right MIME type. 2) If you ask Opera to “Open” a file, Opera saves the file and then opens it. The files are saved to the default download folder and are not deleted later. Some browsers use a temp file and/or a temp folder. I consider this a feature (I like the way Opera does it) but it does surprise some people.