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>
The manual flow is: paste a profile URL into JDownloader, paste the /reels URL
separately (the profile page misses some reels), set the output folder by hand,
repeat per profile. scripts/jd2-sync.ts emits one crawljob per source with the
folder already pointed at the right directory, so folder-watch picks up the
whole batch at once.
Profiles and sidecars are derived with the same grouping logic the server uses,
so output folders always match what the viewer expects to find. --download-base
maps the path for a JDownloader running on another machine (Windows paths
included), since it typically runs on a desktop against the share.
Directories that aren't Instagram profiles are skipped: an archive root also
collects tool output and exports from other services, and pointing a crawl at
those spends requests on instagram.com to be told the profile doesn't exist —
exactly the traffic worth not spending. Filtering is by username shape, plus
--skip and a .jd2ignore file for names that look like usernames but aren't.
Defaults are conservative: chunks=1, because multi-chunk ranged requests are the
one CDN-side pattern that doesn't resemble a browser, and links park in the
LinkGrabber for review rather than auto-starting.
Only posts and reels are emitted; highlight URLs need a numeric id and story
URLs expire, so those stay manual.
Format verified against JDownloader's own explain.txt for the folderwatch
extension, read from the daily SVN mirror rather than one of the decade-stale
GitHub copies.
Also refreshes CLAUDE.md, whose URL-state section still described the query
parameters replaced in 1.4.0, and documents the mobile feed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011uBWhwV3wFQ5MBCcMHHem7
ergosteurandClaude Opus 5