Two additions to the metadata sidecars, following up on the 2026-09-01
collab/dedup investigation already documented here:
- coauthors added to the post-level JSON's include list -- a direct,
native signal for collab detection instead of inferring it from the
filename/directory identity mismatch also documented that day.
- width, height, width_original, height_original and tagged_users get
their own per-file sidecar (event: "file", one JSON per downloaded
media item, named "<filename>.json"), since a carousel's items can
each have different dimensions and tags -- data the existing
post-level JSON has no way to represent. owner is deliberately left
out, same reasoning as audio_user's existing exclusion.
Verified against a live re-fetch of an already-archived carousel:
correct per-item data came back, zero media re-downloaded (skip-archive
still applies; only the new sidecars are new files). 3 new tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011qAds5qr7nZRq5R4yAuxUk
reels-sync.sh is the single-command version of the two-step pipeline:
scrape a profile's reels tab, then fetch and publish whatever's new,
with the same hand-paced settings gdl-cron.sh uses. Takes a bare
username or a full profile URL. Exits clean without touching
gdl-sync.py at all when a profile has nothing new.
Also fixes a real inefficiency in reels-scrape.py's dedup, found by
running the new script twice in a row: checking only the scraped
profile's own directories missed that a shortcode already existed
under its true owner elsewhere in the archive (reposts/collabs by
other tracked accounts), so 9 already-held reels got re-fetched for no
reason. Shortcodes are globally unique, so dedup now checks every
archived profile's listing -- all local requests to the viewer's own
API, never instagram.com, so this costs nothing on the budget that
actually matters. See TOOLING.md for the full story.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011qAds5qr7nZRq5R4yAuxUk
gallery-dl's dedicated reels extractor POSTs to /api/v1/clips/user/,
which now 302-redirects for this account -- confirmed across multiple
profiles, hours apart, with a freshly-warmed session and a correct
X-IG-WWW-Claim header (ruled out as the cause). The reels tab itself
loads fine in a real, already-signed-in browser, so reels-scrape.py
drives that same Chrome via its loopback CDP port, scrolls the reels
tab like a person would, and scrapes /reel/<code>/ links out of the
rendered page instead of calling the blocked endpoint at all.
It only finds shortcodes -- deduped against the archive via the same
--index gdl-sync.py already uses -- and prints new post URLs. Feeding
many of those into gdl-sync.py needed two small additions: a
--post-urls-file so the list doesn't have to become a giant argv, and
inter-item pacing in run_post_urls (each --post-url was its own
subprocess with nothing pacing the gap between them).
Verified end to end against zindoriyam: 26 reels found, 16 already
archived, 10 new ones fetched and published cleanly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011qAds5qr7nZRq5R4yAuxUk
One example per way of selecting what to fetch (urls-file, --profile,
--all, --post-url), plus the routine/stories/full-sweep pacing choices,
so the flags don't have to be reverse-engineered from the arg list.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011qAds5qr7nZRq5R4yAuxUk
Lets an out-of-band link (shared by someone, not one of the tracked
profiles) be pulled in directly by URL, filed under its owner's account
like any other post. Bypasses profile planning, archive-db seeding, and
the --min-interval floor entirely, since it's a single request rather
than a recurring surface to budget against.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011qAds5qr7nZRq5R4yAuxUk
`full` was the misleading one: it is the abort-LIMITED run, the one that
deliberately stops enumerating a profile as soon as it reaches content already
held. Calling it "full" invited exactly the wrong assumption about coverage.
And `sweep` gave no hint that it was the exhaustive one.
full -> profiles every surface, --abort 50, ~40-60 requests
sweep -> full-sweep every surface, no abort, ~420 requests
The old names now exit 2 with a pointer to the new one rather than a bare
"unknown mode", since muscle memory and any stray crontab will still use them.
full-sweep's description now says what it costs. At ~420 requests it is the
same order as the run that preceded the 2026-08-21 scraping warning, spent to
catch a handful of retroactively edited posts, so the docs suggest running it
by hand when you mean to rather than leaving it on a timer. Its cadence was
never actually agreed.
Units renamed to match and re-verified with systemd-analyze; the old ones are
removed from the host. All three timers remain disabled.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UXfdJu7QhSJLr47K7koTDF
All three modes now use the pacing the 2026-08-22 runs used by hand after the
scraping warning -- 12-20s between requests, 5-10s between downloads, 500K --
against gdl-sync.py's defaults of 6-10 / 3-6 / 1M. Those values produced 0 400s
and 0 429s across 18 sources. An archive sync has no deadline; being slow is
free and being restricted is not.
Two things that made "scheduled" not mean much:
`stories` now uses --min-interval 8, not 20. At 20h the daily timer silently
did nothing whenever a manual run had happened the previous afternoon, which is
exactly what happened on 2026-08-21. The floor is there to stop an aborted
restart re-enumerating profiles -- minutes to hours -- and a stories fetch is
one request per profile, so 8h permits about twelve requests a day instead of
six. A run that skips every source now exits 75 and says so.
And the wrapper never reported failure at all. It ran the sync inside
`{ ...; exit $status; } | tee`, and the left side of a pipeline is a subshell,
so that exit set the subshell's status while the script returned tee's --
always 0. Every claim about cron mailing on failure was wrong. Fixed with
bash PIPESTATUS, hence the shebang change.
Verified with a stub sync across five cases: skipped-and-clean exits 75 with a
warning, a real failure propagates its own code, a normal run stays quiet, and
`full` skipping everything is not treated as an anomaly. Testing also caught
that the log name was only second-granular, so runs in the same second shared a
file and the skip check saw the previous run's output; the check now reads a
per-run temp file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UXfdJu7QhSJLr47K7koTDF
mattellite's key is now in the NAS's authorized_keys for agentapi, so
gdl-sync.py publishes straight to the archive. That was the last manual step:
the 2026-08-20 run published locally and rsynced by hand with sshpass, which
no scheduled job could do. Verified end to end -- key auth, then a dry-run
rsync from the fetch host into the archive root.
Three timers, installed and enabled: stories daily, full monthly, sweep
quarterly. A templated gdl-sync@.service takes the mode as its instance name.
Settings that are load-bearing rather than decoration:
RandomizedDelaySec=45m a job firing at exactly 09:00 daily is obviously a
machine; list-timers now shows 09:36, not 09:00
Persistent=true catch up a run the host slept through -- cron just
skips, and a skipped stories run is content gone
TimeoutStartSec=infinity a sweep runs for hours at this pacing; the 90s
default would kill it mid-fetch
Two things caught while installing, both documented: month names are invalid
in OnCalendar's date field (Jan,Apr,Jul,Oct-07 is rejected -- use numerics,
and check with systemd-analyze calendar), and `systemctl --user` over
non-interactive ssh needs XDG_RUNTIME_DIR or it cannot find the bus.
Smoke-tested by starting the stories service: it spent zero Instagram requests
because the 20h floor skipped all six sources, which is exactly what a job
firing twice should do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UXfdJu7QhSJLr47K7koTDF
gdl-sync.py always needed a fistful of paths on the command line, and the
2026-08-20 run published to a local directory and then rsynced to the NAS by
hand -- fine interactively, impossible from cron. gdl-cron.sh takes one
argument (stories|full|sweep) and does the whole thing.
Staging is wiped every run deliberately: what we already hold is decided by
the skip-archive, never by what happens to be sitting in staging, so starting
empty is correct and keeps the publish to just the new files.
Documents the three cadences and what each is for -- notably that only `sweep`
notices carousels edited after we archived them, and that only `stories` loses
content if it is skipped, since stories cannot be backfilled.
Cron notes the two things that would silently break it: cron runs /bin/sh so
$RANDOM does not exist (use shuf), and `%` in a crontab line means newline.
systemd is offered as the better option because RandomizedDelaySec and
Persistent=true are built in -- a host asleep at 09:00 silently skips a cron
job, and a skipped stories run is content gone for good.
The publish step is still blocked on mattellite having no key on the NAS; that
is recorded under Outstanding as the one thing between this and unattended.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UXfdJu7QhSJLr47K7koTDF
The scripts and docs for fetching from Instagram now live here rather than on
main, which is the branch published to GitHub. They carry things that do not
belong in a public repo: the fetch host's public IP, the browser profile path
the cookie is read from, the NAS archive path, and the list of accounts being
archived.
This branch is a superset of main — the viewer plus the tooling — so it can
take main's changes by merging, and the npm script and CLAUDE.md entries that
reference the tooling live here where the files actually exist.
Restored with the sync work from the 2026-08-20 run already in place: the
--abort flag, the corrected yt-dlp install advice, and the measurements behind
both.
Note that main's history was rewritten to strip these paths, so the tooling's
own per-file history does not exist on this branch. It is preserved on gitea
as pre-rewrite-20260820 and pre-rewrite-tooling-20260820.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UXfdJu7QhSJLr47K7koTDF
ergosteurandClaude Sonnet 5