Every claim in docs/gallery-dl.md was measured against the live site and
the archive rather than taken from documentation, because two of the
assumptions turned out to be wrong.
The safety model is the reason the config looks the way it does.
gallery-dl has two API backends: the graphql one issues a request PER
POST for every video and carousel -- the pattern that got this account
banned via Instaloader -- while the default rest one paginates listings
at 30-50 items and carries carousel_media, video_versions and
product_type inline. A 300-post profile costs ~10 requests.
Findings worth recording:
- JD2 stamped filenames in desktop LOCAL time (US Eastern), not UTC.
Across 212 comparable posts: UTC 19 mismatches, UTC-5 10, UTC-4 zero.
{date:Olocal/%Y-%m-%d} reproduces it; the trailing separator must be
omitted or it lands in the strftime format.
- A profile's reels tab returns collab reels owned by OTHER accounts, so
the directory must be forced with -D. JD2 did the same: chuuo3o and
official_artms filenames sit inside "0ct0ber19 - reels".
- Stories and highlights need per-item {shortcode}; {post_shortcode} is
the reel's id and is shared by every item. {date} is per-item, verified
on a 154-item highlight with distinct times.
- gallery-dl reproduces JD2's caption .txt exactly, including writing
nothing for an empty caption and omitting the trailing newline.
- The json sidecar needs `include`, not `fields`; `fields` silently does
nothing in mode:json and leaks audio_user blobs. It yields `type`
(post/reel) -- Instagram's own flag, which can retire the lone-video
heuristic once the scanner reads it.
Naming differences between the two tools are cosmetic: EXPORT_RE already
makes the index optional and parseInt normalises zero-padding, so a mixed
archive parses identically. Tests pin that down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two failures in this session were expensive because nothing recorded them:
- The CSP must keep 'wasm-unsafe-eval' and connect-src data:, because the xz
decompressor for Instaloader sidecars is WebAssembly embedded as a data: URL.
Removing either breaks decoding with a bare "Failed to fetch" and no stack,
and the visible symptom is silent metadata loss rather than an error.
- The service worker precaches index.html with its headers, so a server-only
change never reaches installed clients. The version compiled into the client
is what forces the precache to turn over each release; it is load-bearing,
not decoration.
Also notes that the Vite dev server sends none of these headers, so CSP and PWA
behaviour must be verified against a built dist/ served by server.js, and that
the live archive root is now the archives/ subdirectory.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011uBWhwV3wFQ5MBCcMHHem7
Covers why fetching goes through JDownloader rather than Instaloader (the
instagram.com vs CDN split, and what the metadata gap actually costs), the
settings that matter, cookie handling, the two-URL workflow, jd2-sync usage,
the expected on-disk layout, and what to do when something breaks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011uBWhwV3wFQ5MBCcMHHem7
ergosteurandClaude Opus 5