twimgdump

Just because you’ve liked or retweeted a piece of media on Twitter doesn’t mean that it will still be there tomorrow.
The author might suddenly become permanently suspended. Or they might have a lapse in judgment and irrevocably
delete a bunch of their old tweets. Or they might be “canceled” for Americentric ideological reasons and be bullied
into deleting tweets deemed inappropriate. Whatever the reason may be, the point is: if you like a user’s uploaded
media, you probably want to take local copies of them.

twimgdump is a small command-line tool I developed to help me take local copies of art uploaded by artists I follow
on Twitter. It retrieves all tweets posted to a Twitter user’s media timeline and saves the attached photos, videos
and animated GIFs to disk.

Usage

Usage:
    twimgdump [options] [--] <username>

Options:
    -c, --cursor <cursor>
        Sets the initial cursor value.

    -h, --help
        Displays this help text.

    -o, --output <output-file-path-template>
        Sets the template used to determine the output file paths of
        downloaded media.  The tokens '[user-id]', '[username]',
        '[tweet-id]', '[year]', '[month]', '[day]', '[hour]',
        '[minute]', '[second]', '[millisecond]', '[media-id]', '[stem]',
        '[extension]', '[index]', '[count]', '[width]' and '[height]'
        will be substituted by the corresponding attributes of retrieved
        media.

    -t, --types <types>
        Limits the types of media to be downloaded.  Possible values are
        'photo', 'video' and 'animated-gif'.  Multiple values are
        separated by commas.

    -V, --version
        Displays the version number.

Features

• Downloads all photos, videos and animated GIFs (read: also videos) posted to a Twitter user’s media timeline using
  the highest resolution and quality options available.
• Uses the API the twitter.com website itself uses, meaning that no authentication or API keys are required.
• New: Offers granular control over the output file path of downloaded media using file path templates like
  [username]/[year]/[month]/[stem].[width]x[height][extension].
• Supports downloading media from profiles marked as containing sensitive content.

Limitations

• Only downloads media from a specific profile; does not support downloading media matching an arbitrary search query.
• Very brittle; the program may terminate unexpectedly upon receiving non-successful or malformed responses.
• Does not currently handle rate limiting at all (though this usually won’t be a problem unless you’re downloading an
  enormous amount of media).
• Does not currently support downloading media from protected profiles.
• Will break if Twitter makes sudden changes to their API.

Dependencies

• .NET Core 3.1

Building

dotnet build [-c Release]

Contributing

Contributions are welcome – if you encounter any problems or have any suggestions for improvements, feel free to
create a new issue or open a draft pull request.