Export photos from Cozy Image Gallery before they're gone

One of the most painful sentences in the Cozy Image Gallery 1-star reviews comes from a US merchant who’d been using the app for four years:

“Cannot access the app for days. All my project photos are trapped inside.”

If you’re in a similar situation, this article is for you. We’ll walk through every way we know to recover your original images from Cozy — whether the app is still partially working, completely offline, or somewhere in between.

This guide is useful whether you’re switching to A1 Image Gallery, switching to a different gallery app, or just trying to rescue your photos before they’re lost.

Why this is urgent

Before the how-to, a quick reality check on why this matters.

When you uploaded images to Cozy, they went to Cozy’s own servers. Cozy stored the originals there and served them to your customers from their CDN. As long as Cozy was operational, this worked fine — but it means your original full-resolution photos may not exist anywhere else.

The thumbnails and medium-sized versions that show up on your storefront aren’t the originals — they’re compressed, web-optimised copies. If Cozy’s servers go down permanently or the company shuts down, anything that exists only on their servers could be lost.

If you have local backups of every photo you ever uploaded, you can skip this guide and just re-upload them to whatever app you choose next. If you don’t (and most merchants don’t), keep reading.

Step 1: Check what state Cozy is currently in

Different recovery methods work for different states of Cozy’s brokenness. Identify yours first.

State A: Cozy admin loads and works. You can log into your Shopify admin → Apps → Cozy Image Gallery, and the admin panel loads. You can see your galleries listed. You can click into them.

State B: Cozy admin loads but is partially broken. The admin opens, but some features don’t work. You can see your gallery list but can’t open individual galleries, or you can open them but can’t see the images, or the page shows infinite loading spinners.

State C: Cozy admin doesn’t load at all. The admin panel shows an error, blank page, or redirects somewhere unexpected. The app may show as “uninstalled” even though you didn’t uninstall it.

State D: Cozy is gone. Cozy no longer appears in your installed apps at all, but you can see broken gallery placeholders on your storefront.

The recovery methods below are ordered by which states they work for.

Method 1: Direct download from Cozy admin (works in State A only)

If Cozy’s admin still works, this is the cleanest recovery method.

1. Log into your Shopify admin
2. Go to Apps → Cozy Image Gallery
3. Open each gallery one at a time
4. For each image in the gallery, look for a “Download original” or “View full size” option (the exact label depends on which version of Cozy you have)
5. Right-click the original image → “Save image as” → save to a folder on your computer
6. Organise saved images in folders matching your Cozy gallery names

This is tedious but reliable. The images you save are the originals at full resolution.

Estimated time: Roughly one minute per image. A store with five galleries of ten images each takes about an hour.

Don’t skip this: also save any captions, alt text, or product links you’ve configured for each image. Cozy’s admin is the only place that information exists. Once Cozy disappears, those associations are gone unless you’ve recorded them yourself.

Make a simple spreadsheet:

Gallery name	Image filename	Caption	Alt text	Linked product

You’ll thank yourself later.

Method 2: Extract from your live storefront (works in States A, B, and C)

If Cozy admin is broken but your storefront pages still render (even partially), you can pull images from the rendered pages.

This won’t give you the original full-resolution files. Browsers receive web-optimised versions — usually the largest size needed for the visitor’s screen. For most product photography this is fine. For art prints or photography portfolios where pixel-level quality matters, it’s a compromise.

Doing it manually

1. Open your storefront in a browser
2. Navigate to a page that has a Cozy gallery
3. Right-click on each gallery image → “Save image as”
4. Save with descriptive filenames (or rename later)

This pulls the version your browser actually displays — usually around 1500px wide, give or take.

Doing it faster with browser devtools

If you have a lot of images, this is much faster than right-clicking each one:

1. Open the page with the Cozy gallery
2. Press F12 (Windows) or Cmd+Option+I (Mac) to open browser developer tools
3. Click the Network tab at the top
4. Filter by Img (images only)
5. Refresh the page
6. As the page loads, you’ll see every image URL listed
7. Right-click each image URL → “Open in new tab” → save

For a power-user approach, copy all the image URLs into a text file and use wget or curl to batch-download them:

wget -i image-urls.txt -P ./cozy-recovery/

The downloaded images keep their original filenames from Cozy’s server.

What if the lightbox shows larger images than the page does?

Many Cozy galleries serve thumbnails on the page and load larger images only when a visitor opens the lightbox. To get the lightbox-resolution versions:

1. Open the gallery on your storefront
2. Open developer tools and go to the Network tab
3. Click an image to open the lightbox
4. The full-size image URL will appear in the network log
5. Right-click and save

The lightbox version is typically what Cozy considers “full size” — closer to the original than the thumbnail.

Method 3: Browser cache recovery (works after Cozy is fully down)

If Cozy is completely gone but you previously viewed your own galleries on a specific computer or device, your browser may still have the images cached.

This isn’t a reliable method, but it costs nothing to try.

Chrome: Type chrome://cache/ in the address bar. This page is being deprecated, but in older versions, you can search by filename and recover cached copies.

Firefox: Type about:cache?storage=disk and search for image filenames containing parts of your gallery names.

Safari: Use the Activity window (Window menu → Activity) while viewing a cached page to see what’s being loaded from cache vs network.

Cache recovery is hit-or-miss. Don’t rely on it. But if you have a specific machine that you remember using to view your galleries, it’s worth a check.

Method 4: Wayback Machine archive (works in any state, but for older content only)

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine periodically takes snapshots of public web pages. If your store pages were ever indexed there, the snapshots include the gallery images as they appeared at that point in time.

1. Go to web.archive.org
2. Enter the URL of a page that had your Cozy gallery
3. Look at the calendar — any blue or green date is an archived snapshot
4. Click into a snapshot from before Cozy broke
5. The gallery should render with images intact
6. Right-click and save each image, or use the devtools method from Method 2

The Wayback Machine only archives a subset of pages, and snapshots may be months old. But for popular stores or pages that have been around for years, there’s often something useful in the archive.

Worth knowing: the Internet Archive itself caches images on its own servers, so even if Cozy’s CDN is completely offline, the archived snapshots will still render correctly.

Method 5: Check your Shopify CDN (works if you ever uploaded the same image to a product)

If you’ve ever uploaded an image to both Cozy and a product or page in your Shopify admin (perhaps the same hero image appears in both places), the Shopify-side copy is safe and accessible.

1. Go to Settings → Files in your Shopify admin
2. Browse or search for the filenames you remember
3. Anything in here is in your Shopify Files and isn’t affected by Cozy’s status

This isn’t a primary recovery method — most Cozy users uploaded gallery images only to Cozy — but it’s worth a five-minute check before you give up on a specific image.

What to do with the recovered images

Once you have your photos out of Cozy and on your computer, you have options:

Option 1: Re-upload to whatever app you choose next. Whether you switch to A1 Image Gallery, Robin PRO, or any other alternative, you’ll upload the same images to start fresh. This is the most common path.

Option 2: Use Shopify’s native theme gallery sections. Upload images directly to Shopify Files (under Settings → Files) and use your theme’s built-in gallery section to display them. No app required.

Option 3: Keep them as a backup. Even if you have a working gallery app, having a local folder of every gallery image is worth keeping. If you ever change apps again, you’ll appreciate having them.

How A1 Image Gallery can help

If you’re considering A1 Image Gallery as your next step, our migration tool combines several of the methods above automatically:

• It tries Cozy’s admin API first (Method 1 equivalent)
• It falls back to scraping your rendered storefront (Method 2 equivalent)
• It re-uploads recovered images directly to your Shopify Files
• It replaces the Cozy embeds in your theme with A1 embeds

You can read the step-by-step migration tutorial here if you want to see exactly how it works before installing.

Importantly: even if you don’t end up using A1 Image Gallery, you’re welcome to install it just to run the migration tool. The recovered images go to your Shopify Files (which is yours, not ours) — and once they’re there, they’re yours to use however you like. You can uninstall A1 afterwards and use the images with any other gallery app, or with no app at all.

A note on what we don’t know

We don’t speak for Pasilobus or have inside information about Cozy Image Gallery’s future. We don’t know if Cozy will come back online, be sold to a new developer, or quietly shut down permanently.

What we do know is that several Cozy customers have publicly reported lost access to their own photos. If you’re reading this and you still have any way of getting your images out — through Cozy’s admin, your storefront, or any of the methods above — do it now, before that window closes further.

If you’ve already lost photos to the outage and don’t have backups, the methods above may still recover most of them. The Wayback Machine in particular has saved many merchants we’ve talked to.

If you’ve tried everything and still can’t recover specific images, email us at [email protected] with the URL of the page they were on. We may have additional tricks (Google image cache, third-party archives) that can help. There’s no charge for this — we’ll help you get your photos back regardless of whether you ever become a customer.

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A1 Image Gallery is built by A1 Local, an independent Shopify development studio based in Perth, Australia. We built A1 specifically because of what happened to Cozy customers — to make sure no one ever feels “trapped inside” an app again.