Dear Naitik Agrawal,
Thank you for your interest in the Europeana APIs.
Let me introduce myself first, I am the product manager responsible for the development and operations of the Platform Services at Europeana, where APIs are the primary product we offer.
About your question, we dont offer any means to bulk download thumbnails we keep for the content we make available on the platform. One of the reasons being that we wouldnt know in what way we would cluster them since that would very much depend on the use case which is, in fact, what I would like to understand from you...
... Could you tell us more about your project/work/intention?
How did you make the selection of thumbnails you would like to download? Did you use the Search API and what criteria are you using?
How frequently would you like to do this? and do you always need a fresh copy of the image?
If you feel more comfortable speaking directly with us, you can reach us via the API mailbox at:
a...@europeana.eu or directly to me if you prefer.
Another area that I was hoping to understand is about your script/process and ways to fine-tuning it. For example, the Thumbnail API supports HTTP caching [1] so you can use conditional headers [2] to check if images have changed to avoid downloading unnecessarily an image twice. It also supports HEAD requests in case you want to check if an image exists at all. Improving your code to use these features could greatly reduce your demand in terms of image downloads and make your work finish faster.
Finally, about the rate limiting, we have recently enabled this for the Europeana APIs so that we are able to offer the same level of service to all our customers. We are still understanding what limits could be found reasonable and that is also the reason why my interest in knowing more about your project.
Looking forward to your email.
With kind regards,
Hugo Manguinhas