naidje

🏳️‍⚧️ Fake gamer girl 🏳️‍🌈


 

Be gay! Do crimes! Make art!

 

30-something trans woman of color, PNGTuber, artist, weird nerd.

 

This page is mostly personal posts, SFW art, and rechosts.

 


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tit
@tit

So there's a lot of people wanting to grab what they can before our beloved birdsite goes tits up. There's a few tools out there that can help you do that!

One thing to know is that tools that use the official twitter API (aka the tools that talk to twitter nicely for the non-programmer folks) can only retrieve up to 3200 tweets, and are bound by request limits within certain time intervals.

There are also tools that don't use the API and are more like scrapers; aka they just go over the posts one by one, save them, move on to the next, and so on. If you've got a big account with >3200 tweets, you probably want to use a scraper tool

I'm writing this lil guide just to make it easier for folks to grab what they want and run; it's not always simple, especially for the non-techy folks!

Click "read more" for the guide!


1. Twitter Media Downloader

Note that these instructions assume Chrome is used. I've not installed Mozilla to use for this, but I'm assuming it's mostly the same. If it's not, I suggest installing chrome temporarily so it aligns with this guide. (I'd do Mozilla too but I have time constraints, sorry!)

First off, there's Twitter Media Downloader which is a scraper-like tool that collects the following:

  • tweets (yours or someone else's)
  • tweet media (images / gifs / videos, yours or someone else's)
  • bookmarks (yours only obviously)
  • mentions (in notifications, yours only)
  • likes (yours or someone else's)

Options to grab tweets include:

  • specify a time range or tweet ID range to look for tweets
  • only get text, skip media

Using Twitter Media Downloader

It's available as a browser extension.
The chrome extension can be found here.

The Firefox one is found here!

Click "Add to Chrome" or "Get Extension" on either site to add it to your browser.

To use it, make sure it's activated in your extension settings, and go to a Twitter page. The functionality changes based on where you are on twitter, so there are different locations to go based on what you want to save.

Configuration

In the settings of this extension, you can find a few options. I don't think most of them matter a whole lot for basic usage, but you can customize these to your liking. This guide assumes all of them are left at their defaults, *except* the `Download size limit` which I have set to `10000` (10 thousand, aka 10GB max).

Unless you have millions of images you'll likely never reach this limit, but it's good to set it as high as you can when you leave this tool running overnight.

I've archived my own account with about 5000 media files and ended up with an archive about 1GB in size, for perspective.

Saving a user's media tweets and media files

Go to the profile page of the user. At the top of the page there'll be two buttons, "Media ⇩" and "Likes ⇩".

Click "Media ⇩". A little window titled "Download Tweet ID range" pops up.
Here you can select the things you want to collect and download: you can choose images, GIFs, videos, and whether to include RTs or not. Click "No Media" to download tweets without media as well!

note that if you want ALL tweets you should check both the "image/gif/video" and "no media" checkboxes!

Tweets and their data (contents/likes/etc) are always collected.

You can use the "Likes ⇩" button in the exact same manner; this'll download all the tweets the user has liked.

If you don't fill in a date in one or both of the topmost boxes, the downloader will simply download the user's entire timeline starting from today.

To use a date range, either use a start/end date (multiple formats are supported! try 2022-01-02 for instance) or the ID of the tweet where to start/stop at. (The ID of a tweet is the numerical code following the twitter.com/username/status/ url)

After configuring it to your liking, press "start" and wait until the tool completes its operations.

Be aware that this can take quite some time depending on how many tweets/media it has to collect. Just keep the tab open and go do something else for a while.

After the collection is complete, the tool will download a .zip file with the media, a CSV file of tweets and a log file inside.

Saving your bookmarks

The process is similar to the tweet download as before, except you now have to activate the "Media" button from your Bookmarks page.

Saving your mentions

Same as before, except you need to activate the "Mentions ⇩" button at the top of the page of your Notifications page.

Saving everything from a specific search term

Go to search and type the desired query. Use "Media ⇩" atop the page as before to download all tweets that match the search criteria.

Here's a few fun queries you can use as example:

Save your best tweets

Use the search query: `from:YOURUSERNAME min_faves:1000` to only display tweets from you (or anyone else) with at least 1000 likes.

You can also use the Advanced Search button to make searching these kinds of things easier!

2. @syfaro's Unflwrs tool

This tool has a slightly different use case: where Twitter Media Downloader archives tweets, this tool is geared towards keeping track of who follows you / who you follow, and exporting public info about them (this includes locked accounts you follow iirc!)

You can find the tool here.

And here's a tweet from the developer with some more info and updates.

Features

This tool exports the following:
  • people who follow you
  • people you are following
  • mutuals

From these user accounts, the tool also saves the following:

  • their display name and username
  • their bio
  • the link on their profile page
  • their pinned tweet
  • their profile location

Unflwrs usage

Make sure you're logged in on the account for which you want to export the data.

Head to unflwrs.syfaro.com and click the big blue button "friends and followers export".

Twitter will ask you to authorize the application; check if the right account is selected, and click "authorize app".

After this, you'll be presented with a page titled "friends and followers export"; just click "start" to start the export process.

A download will start immediately, but it'll take a while until this is done as the data is streamed to your device instead of being sent all at once. The resulting zip file contains CSV files (you can open these in Excel or Notepad) with all the requested data. The zip files typically are less than 1MB in size.


I hope this is useful for someone! Do comment if you have questions.


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