Several of the big box providers like Ancestry, Find My Past, and British Origins offer limited-time subscriptions or limited free trials. I just took advantage of a month's cheap subscription at FindMyPast, and now I have a mountain of downloaded census and register images to sort out.
Usually I create a folder for these images that is named after the vendor, so I will know which online repository held those images. But if I'm not careful, the images can be saved to the wrong folder, or other things that I download in the same session can get saved to that folder by mistake.
What I would like to have is some kind of record of my download history. The ideal list would show the information that is in my Firefox download history -- the filename, the site it was downloaded from, and the date it was downloaded.
Searching Mozilla.org yields a lot of history cleaners, but I don't see anything that would allow me to export the download history to a file. Apparently the newer versions of Firefox only keep the history for a limited amount of time, so the window of opportunity to capture the data from there is small.
In the days of DOS, I knew how to pipe the contents of a directory to a file. If I had a list of the filenames, I could put them into a spreadsheet and then populate it with the information about where the files had come from, and eventually, with surname tags or other notes as a quick reminder of why I downloaded the file.
The reason I ask is that both Find My Past and The British Newspaper Archive keep logs of your records, but for the PPV records especially, the amount of time you can view them is limited. So I have a list of newspaper articles that I accessed last year, but since I didn't think to make notes on the BNA site, it isn't always evident what search terms made them appear, or why I collected them. So I spent a lot of time re-accessing some of the newspaper articles on Find My Past and downloading them again, trying to make notes as I went along.
My plan is to catalog and organize all the images and analyze them properly, but how do I preserve the ephemeral data about the repository in the meantime?