Reddit SPD

Reddit SPD, or Reddit Saved Post Downloader, is a CLI tool that can be used to download the content of your Reddit saved posts. This has been created for and tested on Windows, it might not work on Linux based systems.

Requirements

In order to get video files, merge the audio, and add metadata, FFMPPEG is required. You can find several tutorials on YouTube on how to install it (I personally use this build from the yt-dlp project).

Of course, a recent version of Python needs to be installed as well. If your version supports f-strings, then it should be fine, but you will need to install a newer version if it does not.

Parameters:

-h, --help                            show this help message and exit
-u USERNAME, --username USERNAME      Reddit username.
-p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD      Reddit password.
-f FROM_ID, --from_id FROM_ID         Reddit post id to start from (Optional).
-t TO_ID, --to_id TO_ID               Reddit post id to end at (Optional).

How to use

With Python and FFMPEG installed, open a terminal/CMD/PowerShell window and navigate to the directory containing the RedditSPD.py file, with the following command for example: cd "path/"

Make sure you install all the dependancies of the project with the command:

    pip install -r requirements.txt

IMPORTANT!

Reddit seemingly dropped support for its old authentication system, so this tool will no longer work until I find time to figure out how it works. Unfortunatelly, time is an issue for me these days, so I don't know when this will be fixed. In the meantime, I have made changes so that you can use the tool without having to log in. Here is how:

• First, use your browser to log in on your reddit account, and using old reddit, navigate to your saved list.

• For each page of your saved posts, add .json after the word saved on the url, for example:

    https://old.reddit.com/user/{your_username}/saved.json
  
    https://old.reddit.com/user/{your_username}/saved.json?count=25&after={some_id}
  

• You can then save the json content in json files in a directory called saved that should be located in the same directory as the RedditSPD.py file (some browsers offer the option to save the content directly.).

• Finally, you can use the normal commands to save your saved posts and comments locally, with the exception of the password argument, which is no longer relevant.

If you have any experience with the new reddit authentication API, feel free to submit a pull request with working authentication.

IMPORTANT END!

In order to start the process you need to provide your Reddit username and password to the application. You can do this from the command line, by typing in the following command and replacing your credentials:

    python RedditSPD.py -u "username" -p "password"

Shortly afterwards, the file structure that will contain the downloaded posts will be created, you will be logged in, and the download(s) will start.

If you want to skip downloading a few posts, you can specify the starting and /or finishing Reddit post ID (you can get it from the post ULR) by using the following optional parameters:

    python RedditSPD.py -u "username" -p "password" -f "starting post id" -t "final post id"

After the application has finished downlaoding your posts (you will get a final message confirming it), check inside the Archive directory to find a folder with your Reddit username containing all the downloaded data. The data is separated to Images, Videos and Self posts in diferent folders. You can also find 2 files, comments.txt and links.txt containing all the saved comments and links.

Please note that if an Image or Video originated outside of Reddit's own hosting services, like Imgur for example, you will get the link to that content in the links.txt file instead of the content itself.

Image and Video Metadata

Metadata for images and videos include the Reddit post title, url, author username and post id, provided as title and comment metadata in the files. The comment metadata in particular is provided in a json format, so it can be easily extracted and used by another application if needed.

When it comes to images, if the image is in a gif format, unfortunately the metadata tags are not supported, so no metadata is preserved (looking for a solution on this, one option is converting them to mp4 and add metadata with FFMPEG). Other image types are saved in the jpeg format, which supports the metadata tags.

For videos, metadata is added with FFMPEG.

Videos and FFMPEG

Other than addding metadata, there is another reason that FFMPEG is a requirement for downloading Reddit Videos.

Video and audio is provided seperately by Reddit. In order to combine the two in a single video file we need another dependancy. FFMPEG is the most efficient in doing this. It is also one of the most useful and widespread tools used for video editing, so it seems like the best choice. In case you want to use a different tool or application to combine the files, if FFMPEG is not instaled in your system, both seperate audio and video files will be preserved, so you can combine them as you wish.

Errors

If the application encounters any errors, an error.log file will be created. You can submit an issue and attach the log, so I can try and fix the issue, or you can fix it yourself and submit a pull request with the fix. Feel free to choose either approach!

Future ideas

• Add ability to download media from popular hosting services (for example Imgur).
• Improve the structure of the comments.txt and links.txt files, as the content can be annoying to use with another application to extract data.
• Currently no metadata is being added to .gif images, as the format does not support it. Find some solution.
• Improve documentation with further info on metadata for images and videos.
• Refactoring/ bug fixes.

Thank you and enjoy!