How to Download a Whole Folder from Internet Archive

Internet Archive items are not folders in the desktop sense — they are "items," each with a unique identifier. To grab everything inside one in a single shot, you have two practical options.

Option 1: The built-in ZIP

Most items expose a generated ZIP at https://archive.org/compress/IDENTIFIER — replace IDENTIFIER with the item's identifier, the slug at the end of the item URL. For example, the identifier for archive.org/details/nasa-images-1969 would be nasa-images-1969. The ZIP is generated on demand and can take a minute for large items. It includes every file the item holds, originals and derivatives both.

Option 2: The ia command-line tool

Faster than the ZIP for large items, and resumes cleanly if a connection drops. Install with pip install internetarchive, then run ia download IDENTIFIER. This drops every file into a folder named after the identifier in your current directory. To exclude derived files (the auto-generated EPUBs, OGG conversions, thumbnails) and pull only what was originally uploaded, add the --source=original flag. To pick specific formats, pass --format="PDF" or --format="MP3".

A typical "give me only the source files" run uses: ia download IDENTIFIER --source=original

Downloading a whole collection

If the item is a collection rather than a single piece — collections hold many items — you can list everything in it and download all of them by piping ia search with a collection filter into ia download. Run ia search "collection:COLLECTION_NAME" --itemlist and pipe the output to ia download for each result. Make sure you have the disk space. Some collections run into terabytes.

When you are exploring large collections and need to figure out which items are worth downloading, Arkibber helps you browse and filter collection contents by media type and date before committing to a bulk download.