I was doing a course at college where the professor decided to make the finals an open-book exam. He put his slides up on SpeakerDeck, so I needed to figure out a way to get them printed without too much hassle.

When I opened the Network tab in Chrome, I discovered that the SpeakerDeck widget loads slides as image files. Each slide follows a predictable URL pattern on Amazon S3: 

https://speakerd.s3.amazonaws.com/presentations/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/slide_1.jpg?yyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Once you have the presentation ID and the total number of slides, you can fetch every slide image systematically. I used a Fish Shell script with wget to loop through and download all slides in sequence.

The Approach

  1. Open the SpeakerDeck presentation in your browser.
  2. Open the Network tab in Developer Tools and filter for image requests.
  3. Identify the base URL pattern — slides are numbered sequentially (slide_1.jpg, slide_2.jpg, etc.).
  4. Write a shell loop using wget to pull down every slide image.

This method is especially handy when you need printed copies of course materials for studying or open-book exams. The images download at full resolution, making them suitable for printing or offline reference.