mirror a site with httrack and pull every image locally for research, backups, or reference without manual saves.
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By Enzo Sison -- Founder of Prism
ever spot a beautifully designed website (opens in a new tab) and wish you could keep every image for inspiration, analysis, or reference later? manually saving them one by one is slow and easy to mess up. the smarter move is httrack: a free website copier that mirrors a site locally and keeps the original folder structure intact.
in this walkthrough, you will learn how we install httrack, craft the right filters to grab only images, and keep everything clean for future work.
httrack crawls a live site, follows its links, and saves the assets it finds. unlike a basic wget command, it understands deeper structures and dynamic image paths, so you get a faithful copy of the media library alongside the html, css, and javascript.
think of it as wget on steroids: smarter defaults, broader compatibility, and plenty of flags to control the download.
⚠️ only download assets you own or have permission to analyze. httrack is a research and backup tool, not a way to redistribute paid media.
brew install httrack
need homebrew first?
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
once that finishes, httrack is ready to use.
example target: Holistic Founder (opens in a new tab)
want the full local rebuild workflow after mirroring? see our codex rebuild guide.
# 1. create a folder for the download
mkdir ~/Desktop/holisticfounder-images
# 2. move into that folder
cd ~/Desktop/holisticfounder-images
# 3. mirror the site and keep only images
httrack https://www.holisticfounder.com/ -O ./ -%v "+*.jpg" "+*.jpeg" "+*.png" "+*.webp" "+*.gif" "+*.svg" "-ad.doubleclick.net/*"
| flag | what it does |
| --- | --- |
| -O ./ | saves the mirrored site to the current folder |
| -%v | enables verbose output so you can watch progress |
| "+*.jpg" "+*.png" ... | includes specific image extensions |
| "-ad.doubleclick.net/*" | skips ad and tracking links |
| https://... | the starting url httrack will crawl |
after the crawl completes you will have a folder full of images, organized by the original path structure.
confirm the download worked:
find . -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.jpeg" -o -iname "*.png" -o -iname "*.webp" -o -iname "*.gif" -o -iname "*.svg" \) | wc -l
prefer a single directory with every image? run:
find . -type f \( -iname "*.jpg" -o -iname "*.jpeg" -o -iname "*.png" -o -iname "*.webp" -o -iname "*.gif" -o -iname "*.svg" \) -exec mv {} ~/Desktop/holisticfounder-images/ \;
that moves every image into one top-level folder for quick browsing.
httrack https://example.com -O ./my-site -r3--sockets=4wget — ideal for static sites with straightforward assets.httrack remains the most flexible approach when you need structure, filters, and reliable results.
keeping a local image archive accelerates redesigns, brand audits, and inspiration boards. at prism we use this httrack workflow whenever we onboard a client or map competitor ecosystems — it turns hours of manual downloading into minutes.
✨ ready to organize your visual assets or optimize how your site loads media? let's build your brand presence with faster, cleaner systems.