Mastodon downloader for images and videos
Mastodon, a federated social network has been growing increasingly in recent years. If you are looking for a way to bulk download images and videos from Mastodon, this tutorial is for you. You will need a Mastodon downloader and an example of such is WFDownloader App. It can bulk download images and videos from virtually any Mastodon instance. It can download the media from a user page, tags, likes/favourites, bookmarks, and even status pages. It even allows you to download from multiple Mastodon pages at once. All you will need to do is copy and paste the link of the Mastodon page, paste it into the application, and then you will be able to download the Mastodon media. To download from Mastodon, follow the steps below:
1. Open the Mastodon page whose media you want to download. It could be a status page, media page, etc.
2. Copy the Mastodon URL from your browser address bar. You can right-click to do this.
3. Open WFDownloader App and click the blue “Add” button and the Mastodon URL should already be entered for you.
4. Click the “Browse” button to select the folder to save the downloaded media.
5. Click “Confirm” and the link search should begin as shown below. However, if the link search doesn’t start for you, you might get either of two error messages.
If you get “Failed. Login is required for this page. Please import cookies from your browser”, see what to do about that here.
If you get the “Failed. Webpage not supported” error, see what to do about that here.
6. Once the link search is complete, click “Confirm” to create a new batch.
7. Click the “Start” button to start downloading the batch.
8. That’s it. You can open the folder when the download is completed. Right-click the batch to do so.
Downloading my Mastodon favourites or bookmarks
The above is the general approach to downloading media from any Mastodon page. However, if you try to download from your favourites or bookmarks page, you will get the error “Failed. Login is required for this page. Please import cookies from your browser” because you need to be logged in to view those pages but you aren’t logged in in WFDownloader App.
To be able to download from those pages, you will either need to log in using WFDownloader App’s browser or import cookies into WFDownloader App. After you have done either of those, the next time you search, the software will extract the media instead of giving you that error.
Downloading from unsupported Mastodon instances
When trying to download from a Mastodon instance, you may get the error “Webpage is not supported”.
If you are sure the website is a Mastodon instance, simply click “Try generic image search” and it should work as the app can detect most Mastodon instances. Note that if the page requires being logged in to view it, you need to either import cookies or click on “Show more”, and then click the “Login via browser” button to log in before searching again. An example is shown below.
Downloading from multiple Mastodon pages at once
If you are in a situation where you have multiple Mastodon pages with media you want to extract, for example, you have a list of Mastodon profiles or links to statuses and you don’t want to do them one by one, you can use the batch link search feature of WFDownloader App.
1. Go to Tasks > Batch link search.
2. Copy and paste the list of Mastodon links/URLs into the text area. Make sure each link starts on a new line.
3. Provide a batch name, folder location, and set the link search options you want.
4. Click “Confirm” and leave it to go through the list while downloading all the media.
5. Click “Accept” once it’s completed.
Note that some sites don’t like people doing this or require you to set appropriate delays so that you don’t crawl their site too fast. Therefore, you should check with the site before doing this or you could get blocked by the site. For more information on how to use and customize the batch link search feature, read this.
Updating a Mastodon batch to download only new media
If you downloaded from a Mastodon profile or account that posts regularly, you might be looking for a way to download just the new media without having to download everything all over again. Fortunately, this is very easy to do in WFDownloader App. Just click the “Update” button that corresponds to the batch and that’s it! Only the new media will be downloaded.
Conclusion
We’ve gone through an easy and robust way to bulk download Mastodon images and videos via WFDownloader App. It can download from whole profiles, statuses, and even favourites and bookmarks. It even allows you to queue downloading from multiple Mastodon pages. Finally, it also works on other social media sites such as Bluesky, Lemmy, Reddit, X, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. If this tutorial helped you, let me know in the comments. If you have any questions or suggestions, you can also write. Note that for issues or bugs, you should contact support. Thanks for reading!
Originally published at https://www.wfdownloader.xyz on June 25, 2024.
