instaarchive-viewer/docs/gallery-dl.md

# gallery-dl — a CLI replacement for JDownloader2

Status: **design + verified config.** `scripts/gdl-sync.py` is a skeleton; no
profile has been migrated yet.

Everything below was measured against the live site and the real archive on
2026-08-16, not inferred from documentation.

## Why gallery-dl and not a hand-rolled script

The hard parts of fetching Instagram are pagination, cookie handling, CDN URL
expiry and resumption. gallery-dl already has all of them, plus extractors that
map 1:1 onto our sidecar directory layout (`posts`, `reels`, `stories`,
`highlights`). Rolling our own would mean reimplementing the ban-sensitive part
by hand.

## The account was suspended on 2026-08-17 — read this first

The account used for all of the below was suspended the same day this tooling
was built, for "activity that doesn't follow our Community Standards on spam".
The fetching was not the expensive part. **Verification was.**

What was actually spent against `instagram.com` in a few hours, from one
session and one IP:

| activity | rough requests | downloaded |
|---|---:|---|
| enumerating a profile grid by scrolling it in an automated browser | ~18 pages | nothing |
| the same profile again, after a bug in the scraping selector | ~18 pages | nothing |
| a Reels tab enumerated the same way | ~9 pages | nothing |
| full `-j` metadata dumps of one profile, twice | ~16 pages | nothing |
| `--simulate` runs over the same profile, three times | ~24 pages | nothing |
| single-post `/p/<code>/` fetches while testing filename formats | ~8 | a handful |
| an aborted sync that re-ran every listing pass before dying | ~40 pages | ~270 MB |
| the real sync, 24 sources across 6 profiles | ~150 pages | 2.2 GB |

The two rows that actually mattered to the archive are the last one and part of
the second-to-last. **Everything above them produced no files at all**, and
together they were a comparable number of requests.

The warnings arrived in this order and were each rationalised:

1. `429 Too Many Requests` from `scontent-*.cdninstagram.com`, losing two
   videos. Treated as a pacing problem — pacing was lowered and the run
   continued.
2. `400 Bad Request` from `/api/v1/highlights/<id>/highlights_tray/`, on an
   endpoint that had worked hours earlier. Correctly read as a possible block;
   requests stopped.
3. Suspension.

**Treat the first CDN 429 as a stop signal for the session, not a tuning
parameter.** It is the tolerant surface complaining; if that surface is
complaining, the rate-limited one has been unhappy for a while.

### Rules that follow from this

- **Count verification requests against the same budget as fetching.** A
  `--simulate`, a `-j` dump and a browser scroll all hit `instagram.com` and
  download nothing. Being read-only does not make them free; it makes them
  invisible, which is worse.
- **Never enumerate the live site with an automated browser.** Scrolling a
  214-post grid is ~18 paginated GraphQL loads at machine speed with no dwell
  time between them. It is the most obviously non-human thing in this whole
  document, and it was done here twice on one profile.
- **Verify against the archive, not against Instagram.** Every naming, dating
  and classification question answered in this file could have been answered
  from files already on disk plus a single listing pass.
- **`probe_live` is not cached, so every restart re-enumerates everything.**
  The aborted run cost a full duplicate set of listing passes for five
  profiles. Cache probe output to disk before running anything twice.
- **Budget per session, not per command.** Nothing in the tooling knows what
  the last command spent.

### For a replacement account

- Let it exist and be used normally for a while before pointing any tool at it.
- Keep the cookie on one machine and one public IP, as before.
- Start with a single small profile and stop for the day afterwards.
- Prefer Instagram's own "Download a copy" export where possible: it is
  first-party, costs no scraping requests, and carries the metadata this whole
  document works around not having.

## The safety model — read this before changing any option

The ban vector is **requests to `instagram.com`**, not bandwidth. See
`docs/jdownloader.md` for the history; Instaloader got this account banned by
asking `instagram.com` a question *per post*.

gallery-dl has two API backends and the difference is exactly that vector:

```python
if self.config("api") == "graphql":
    self.api = InstagramGraphqlAPI(self)   # per-post api.media() for every
else:                                      # video and every carousel
    self.api = InstagramRestAPI(self)      # <- default, listing-only
```

The REST backend paginates at `count: 30` (feed) / `page_size: 50` (clips), and
those responses already carry `carousel_media`, `image_versions2`,
`video_versions` and `product_type`. **No per-post request.** A 300-post
profile costs roughly 10 requests to `instagram.com`.

Rules, in order of importance:

1. **`"api": "rest"` always.** Never `graphql`. This is the whole ballgame.
2. **Never enable `metadata`-style options that trigger extra calls.** If a
   field is not already in the listing response, it is not worth a request.
3. **Pace it.** `"sleep-request": [4.0, 7.0]` — a randomised gap, not a fixed
   one. Also `"sleep": [1.0, 3.0]` between downloads.
4. **Cap the download rate** (`downloader.http.rate`) so the CDN side looks like
   a person, not a mirror.
5. **Run from the same public IP as the browser the cookie came from.** At time
   of writing that is `mattellite` (`66.23.52.196`); the dev workstation is a
   *different* public IP and using the cookie from there is precisely what
   session-hijack detection looks for.
6. **No programmatic login, ever.** gallery-dl's username/password path is
   disabled upstream anyway; use `--cookies-from-browser`.

Do not add proxy rotation, fingerprint spoofing or account rotation. Throttling
and request-avoidance are welcome; evasion is not.

### Cookies

The logged-in Chrome on `mattellite` runs with a non-default profile:

```
--user-data-dir=/home/matt/.config/google-chrome-devtools
```

so the cookie flag is:

```
--cookies-from-browser "chrome:/home/matt/.config/google-chrome-devtools"
```

Plain `--cookies-from-browser chrome` fails with "Unable to find chrome cookies
database" because it looks in `~/.config/google-chrome/`.

Anonymous access is **not** a viable fallback: it serves lower-resolution media,
caps profile pagination at 12 posts, and returns `AuthRequired` for stories and
highlights.

## Output format

The viewer's parser is the contract, not JD2's exact bytes. `EXPORT_RE` in
`src/lib/archive-patterns.ts` accepts all of these, and normalises the index
with `parseInt`, so **JD2 and gallery-dl naming interoperate**:

```
"… - CrORBIcJJbM.mp4"      -> postId=CrORBIcJJbM  index=1
"… - CrORBIcJJbM - 1.mp4"  -> postId=CrORBIcJJbM  index=1
"… - C53YPQzp7Wj - 09.jpg" -> postId=C53YPQzp7Wj  index=9
```

That means zero-padding and the presence/absence of ` - N` on single-media posts
are cosmetic. Don't spend effort forcing them.

### Directory layout

| kind | directory | note |
|---|---|---|
| posts | `<user>` | |
| reels | `<user> - reels` | |
| stories | `story - <user>` | |
| highlights | `story highlights - <user> - <title>` | |

**Force the directory with `-D`; never use `{username}` for it.** A profile's
reels tab returns *collab reels owned by other accounts* — `/0ct0ber19/reels/`
served 6 reels owned by `official_artms` and 1 by `chuuo3o`. With
`{username}` those would scatter into `official_artms - reels/`. JD2 got this
right and the archive proves it: `chuuo3o` and `official_artms` filenames sit
inside `0ct0ber19 - reels/`.

So: **owner in the filename, crawl scope in the directory.**

### Filenames

```jsonc
"filename": {
  "sidecar_shortcode and count >= 10":
      "{date:Olocal/%Y-%m-%d}_{username} - {post_shortcode} - {num:02}.{extension}",
  "sidecar_shortcode":
      "{date:Olocal/%Y-%m-%d}_{username} - {post_shortcode} - {num}.{extension}",
  "":
      "{date:Olocal/%Y-%m-%d}_{username} - {post_shortcode}.{extension}"
}
```

`sidecar_shortcode` is set only when the post is a carousel, so it is the
carousel discriminator. Conditions are evaluated in order, first match wins
(`path.py:265`).

Stories and highlights use the per-item `{shortcode}`, not `{post_shortcode}`
(which is the *reel's* id, shared by every item in it):

```
"{date:Olocal/%Y-%m-%d}_{username} - {shortcode}.{extension}"
```

`{date}` on a story/highlight file is the **per-item** `taken_at`
(`instagram.py:337` prefers `item["taken_at"]`), verified on a 154-item
highlight whose items carried distinct times while `post_date` stayed pinned to
the reel. Highlights therefore gain real dates — today they fall back to
directory mtime.

### The timezone is not UTC

JD2 stamped filenames in **desktop local time (US Eastern)**. Measured across
212 comparable posts:

| model | mismatches |
|---|---:|
| UTC | 19 |
| UTC−5 (EST) | 10 |
| UTC−4 (EDT) | **0** |
| America/New_York (DST-aware) | **0** |

`{date:Olocal/%Y-%m-%d}` uses the machine's local zone with per-timestamp DST
awareness, which reproduces it — `mattellite` is `America/Toronto`, the same
offsets. Note the **trailing `/` must be omitted**: `Olocal/%Y-%m-%d/` puts the
separator into the strftime format and it sanitises to an underscore, giving
`2026-08-15__0ct0ber19`.

If the sync ever moves to a host in another timezone, set an explicit
`{date:O-4/…}` or the dates will silently shift for ~9% of posts.

### Caption sidecars

JD2 writes one `.txt` per post, named without the index, containing the caption
with **no trailing newline**, and writes nothing when the caption is empty
(measured: 197 of 217 posts, 86 of 86 reels, 0 of 10 stories, 0 of 16
highlights). gallery-dl reproduces this exactly with the default
`"empty": false`:

```jsonc
{ "name": "metadata", "event": "post", "mode": "custom",
  "content-format": "{description}", "extension": "txt",
  "filename": "{date:Olocal/%Y-%m-%d}_{username} - {post_shortcode}.txt" }
```

`"event": "post"` is what makes it one file per post rather than per media file.

### Metadata sidecar (new — JD2 had no equivalent)

```jsonc
{ "name": "metadata", "event": "post", "mode": "json",
  "filename": "{date:Olocal/%Y-%m-%d}_{username} - {post_shortcode}.json",
  "include": ["post_shortcode","post_id","type","date","post_date","username",
              "fullname","owner_id","description","count","likes","post_url",
              "sidecar_shortcode"] }
```

Use **`include`**, not `fields` — `fields` is for `mode: custom` and silently
does nothing here, leaving `audio_user` blobs (including another user's profile
picture URL) in the output.

The payoff is `type`, which is Instagram's own classification:

```json
{ "post_shortcode": "DbdG9L9jU4m", "type": "post",  "count": 2 }   // feed video
{ "post_shortcode": "Db-lNCoib9m", "type": "reel",  "count": 1 }   // real reel
```

This is the `product_type: "clips"` signal, delivered free in the listing
response. It is the authoritative answer to "is this a reel", and would let the
viewer retire the lone-video heuristic in `src/lib/post-tabs.ts` — see
"Scanner work" below.

**`type` is only populated by listing extractors.** Extracting a single
`/p/<shortcode>/` URL leaves it `null`. Sync always uses listing URLs, so this
only matters when testing by hand.

## Cadence, and the budget that enforces it

**Monthly for everything, daily for stories only.** Stories expire in 24h and
cannot be backfilled, so they are the one surface where missing a day means
losing the content permanently. Everything else can wait — the skip-archive
means an infrequent full sync costs barely more than a frequent one, because it
only fetches what is new.

```
# monthly, everything
gdl-sync.py --index <viewer-url> --staging ~/gdl/staging \
    --publish <user>@<nas>:<archives> --archive-db ~/gdl/artms.db \
    --urls-file artms_account_links.txt --execute

# daily, stories only -- one request per profile
gdl-sync.py ... --only stories --execute
```

A stories-only run is one source per profile and **never seeds**, because a
story cannot be in the archive before it is fetched; probing would double the
cost of the cheapest surface for no benefit. Six profiles is a handful of
requests.

When scheduling it, **randomise the minute and avoid the hour boundary**. A job
that fires at exactly 09:00 every day is a machine; one that fires somewhere in
a window looks like someone opening the app.

The tool now refuses to repeat itself:

| flag | default | what it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| `--min-interval` | 20h | re-fetching a source touched recently — the aborted-restart case that re-enumerated five profiles |
| `--probe-ttl` | 24h | paying for a listing pass twice within a run cycle |
| `--max-sources` | off | a runaway list touching more than intended |
| `--force` | off | (escape hatch: ignores both guards) |

State lives beside the archive DB as `<db>.state.json`, recording per source
when it was seeded and last fetched. **Seeding is a one-time bootstrap**: after
the first successful sync the archive DB records everything gallery-dl has
seen, so the source is never probed again. That is the single biggest saving
here — a second full sync costs roughly half what the first did.

## Incremental sync — why the fetch host needs no copy of the archive

gallery-dl can skip already-held media two ways, and the difference decides
whether the fetcher needs the archive mounted:

- **By file existence** (default). Needs the destination to already contain the
  files, so it only works if the archive is mounted where gallery-dl writes.
- **By skip-archive** (`--download-archive`). A sqlite DB of ids. Needs nothing
  on disk.

We use the second, so the fetch host can write to **local disk and rsync
afterwards**. That avoids writing tens of thousands of small files over CIFS,
and keeps a mid-sync failure from leaving partial files on the live Resilio
share.

The key is `archive_prefix + archive_fmt`, which for this extractor is the
literal `instagram` plus the per-media numeric pk (`instagram.py:25`,
`job.py:713-719`). Verified: a 3-image carousel produced

```
instagram3079387627521318672
instagram3079387627521429433
instagram3079387627529716672
```

and a second run skipped every media file, rewriting only the idempotent
`.txt`/`.json` sidecars.

**Seeding.** `media_id` is not in our filenames, so the DB cannot be built from
names alone — but one listing pass (the pass we make anyway) maps every live
item to its `media_id`, and the archive's *file listing* says which we already
hold. No extra Instagram requests, and no archive content — a listing is
enough, which `GET /api/archives/:name/files` already serves.

Measured on `0ct0ber19`: 2275 live media items, 2248 seeded from the existing
listing, **27 left to download** — precisely the media of the two posts added
since the last crawl.

The one trap, which silently seeds almost nothing if you get it backwards:

| surface | filed under | why |
|---|---|---|
| posts, reels | `post_shortcode` | carousel children each have their own `shortcode`, which never appears in a filename |
| stories, highlights | `shortcode` (per item) | `post_shortcode` is the containing reel's id, shared by every item |

`live_key()` encodes this. Matching on the wrong field seeded 5 of 2275.

## Publishing

The fetch host stages to local disk and rsyncs afterwards. `rsync
--ignore-existing` is not an optimisation but the safety property: the archive
deliberately outlives Instagram, so publishing must only ever **add**. No
`--delete`, and nothing already present is overwritten — including sidecars,
which are rewritten every run and would otherwise churn the synced share.

Publishing happens once at the end of a run, so a profile that fails midway
never reaches the archive half-written.

## Status

In use. `withaseul` has been fetched and published to the live archive — 322
files added (74 media, 241 `.json`, 7 `.txt`), nothing overwritten or deleted.
Of the 74 new media files, **zero** duplicated media already held under a
different name, which is the check that says JD2 and gallery-dl naming really
do converge.

Published files land owned by the SSH user rather than `rslsync`. The viewer
reads them fine (world-readable), but Resilio does not own what it syncs; worth
a `chown` if that ever matters.

The profiles to fetch live in `artms_account_links.txt` at the archive root,
passed with `--urls-file`.

## Verified run

`withaseul`, all four surfaces, staged locally and published to a scratch
directory before the live publish above:

```
==> withaseul / posts      seeded 915 of 984 live items
==> withaseul / reels      seeded  28 of  34 live items
==> withaseul / stories    no results   (none active)
==> withaseul / highlights no results
```

Output landed correctly, including the collab-reel case — `withaseul - reels`
contains 53 files owned by `withaseul`, 10 by `cher_ryppo`, 3 by `0ct0ber19`
and 2 by `official_artms`, all with the owner in the filename and the crawl
scope as the directory.

### The CDN rate-limits, and the first run tripped it

At `rate: 3M` with `sleep: [1.0, 3.0]`, `scontent-*.cdninstagram.com` returned
**`429 Too Many Requests`** and two videos were lost (gallery-dl retried, then
gave up with exit 4). This is the *tolerant* surface complaining, which is a
clear signal the pacing was too aggressive.

Defaults are now:

| option | value |
|---|---|
| `--rate` | `1M` |
| `--sleep-request` | 6–10 s |
| `--sleep` | 3–6 s |
| `sleep-429` | 120 s |
| `retries` (extractor and downloader) | 8 |

Re-running with those recovered both videos and produced **0 failures and 0
429s**. Do not raise them for speed; an archive sync has no deadline.

### yt-dlp is worth installing

Without it, gallery-dl logs `Cannot import yt-dlp or youtube-dl` and falls back
to a progressive URL for DASH videos. The fallback mostly works but is what the
429s hit hardest. `pipx install yt-dlp` on the fetch host.

## Known quirks

- **`count` is not the emitted file count.** For 135 of 214 posts it was exactly
  one higher than the number of files written. This makes the `count >= 10`
  padding condition mis-pad a handful of 9-item posts (10 of 214 measured). Since
  the parser normalises the index, this is cosmetic — but it means a re-fetch
  over an existing JD2 tree writes `- 01.jpg` beside an existing `- 1.jpg`.
- **Carousels get edited.** Two posts had a different media count live than on
  disk. Padding width follows the count *at download time*, so a grown carousel
  produces mixed widths — the archive already contains one such post from JD2.
- **Highlights already have two naming styles on disk**, and every undated file
  has a dated twin. The scanner dedupes by index so they render once; it is
  wasted disk, not a display bug.

## Scanner work (not done yet)

`useArchiveScanner` currently treats any `.json` in the tree as a possible
manifest. Adding gallery-dl sidecars needs it to distinguish three things:

1. Instagram export manifests (`posts_1.json`) — existing path.
2. Instaloader `.json.xz` — existing path, GraphQL node shape.
3. gallery-dl `.json` — new, flat shape, identified by having
   `post_shortcode` + `type` at the top level.

Once (3) is read, `source`/`isStory` and the reel flag should come from `type`
rather than from the directory and the lone-video heuristic.

## Test cases

Real subjects, all present in the archive today. See
`scripts/gdl-sync.py --selftest` for the harness.

| # | case | shortcode | expected |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | single image | `CwcXnQhOqFG` | one `.jpg`, no index |
| 2 | single feed video | `DbdG9L9jU4m` | one `.mp4`, `type: post` |
| 3 | carousel, images only | `Cq8LrxSJAJE` | `- 1 … - 3` |
| 4 | carousel, image + video | `CtohvHxLnWO` | `- 1.jpg … - 4.mp4`, **no `.txt`** |
| 5 | carousel of exactly 9 | `Cv2Hb_brx_N` | 1-digit index |
| 6 | carousel of 10+ | `CzM8Uf6B6H_` | 2-digit index `- 01 … - 10` |
| 7 | reel shown on the posts grid | `C8FHM6EJl15` | in `<user>`, `type: reel` |
| 8 | reel on the reels tab | `Db-lNCoib9m` | in `<user> - reels`, `type: reel` |
| 9 | collab reel (other owner) | `DYcZOb0h6Sv` | dir `0ct0ber19 - reels`, filename `chuuo3o` |
| 10 | story | live only | `story - <user>`, per-item shortcode + date |
| 11 | story highlight | `C-IImhvpFuk` | `story highlights - <user> - <title>` |
| 12 | highlight, unicode title | `Drawheeing⠀` | trailing U+2800 preserved in dirname |
| 13 | empty caption | `CrdsY5CrSsO` | media written, `.txt` absent |
| 14 | deleted post | `C0TgI7sphfZ` | on disk, absent live — must not be removed |
| 15 | edited carousel | `C7zG7-jJMlq` | 18 on disk, 8 live — must not be removed |
| 16 | pinned posts | `0ct0ber19` | 3 pinned, returned out of date order |
| 17 | profile avatar | `0ct0ber19.jpg` | base dir, undated |

Cases 14–16 are reconciliation, not naming: **a sync must never delete**, since
the archive deliberately outlives Instagram.

Not covered, decide before relying on them: the `/reposts/` tab (`0ct0ber19`
has one) and `/tagged/`. Neither is fetched today.