Download all submission files in bulk

Pull all the uploaded files from your applicants to your own pc or Dropbox account. Download a PDF of each submission too.

Zack Schwartz avatar
Written by Zack Schwartz
Updated over a week ago

You may require that your applicants upload files to their submissions. OpenWater stores this data nicely for you, but you may want to download all of those files at some point. Additionally, you can download PDFs of all of the submissions as well.

There are two methods to pull all of the files from the system.

  • Download to your own computer using our Windows or Mac applications

  • Download the files to your Dropbox account

If you wish to download to your computer, please download and install the appropriate application for

To use Dropbox, you need to have a Dropbox account that has enough space to store all of your submission files. You can sign up for Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/

To download all the files, you first need to access a submission report or create a new report. Select the report for which you want to download submissions from.

Click Download Files.

Options

Choose your desired options of what you wish to download and in what folder structure. Choose Download all Media Attached to Applications to pull the actual files uploaded with the submissions. Check Download PDF as Applicant / Judge if you want to include a PDF of the submission as well.

You can also choose to download everything to one base folder, or to break it up into a tree-like folder structure that is named either by Category Name or Category Code. Categories and sub-categories will have folders and sub-folders. 

For example:
Category A\Sub Category A
Category B\Sub Category B\Sub Sub Category C

If you chose the Flat option, all categories and sub categories will be flattened to Category A_Sub Category A
Category B_Sub Category B_Sub Sub Category C

Flat categories are useful if you have a large tree structure for you categories.

Submissions will be placed in the folder for its category.

You can also place each set of files for each submission in their own folder, which can be named with the Application Name or the submission ID. 

And finally, you can name each file consistently by Application Name, Application Code, or use the Original File Names.

If necessary, you can use the Consistent File Naming by Application Code to blind judges from knowing application names submitted by applicants. This option is also recommended for better syncing when saving files to Dropbox.

Choose the method you prefer to download with.

Save to Dropbox

We recommend this approach since the download will be the fastest. Clicking Save to Dropbox will show a popup asking you to login with your Dropbox account. Make sure your Dropbox account has enough storage for the download.

It is recommended to use the Consistent File Naming by Application Code instead of Consistent File Naming by Application Name for files to save properly into Dropbox.

Download with OpenWater

This approach will use the OpenWater provided applications. Click Begin Download Using OpenWater Bulk Download Tool after you have downloaded the tool listed at the beginning of this help article.

Select a folder to download to on your local machine.

Start the download and observe the progress as each file is downloaded.

View Individual Files

View Individual Files will show a table with links to quickly download one-off files as needed.

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