I'm trying to upload images from an artist's twitter, but the media tab only goes back so far even though there are older images.

I'm checking out @UTXShapeshifter https://twitter.com/UTXShapeshifter/media on desktop. The media interface is much better on desktop.

As of this writing it says that there are 1,158 pics. However, the media tab only scrolls down to an image dating back to Oct 6, 2017. There are older images but they can only be found using advanced search. (Trying to scroll down the posts tab is an exercise in insanity: there are 6706 of them!)

However, even advanced search has limits: it only shows about ~45 images before giving up. Furthermore, some images don't show up in advanced search but do show up under the user page's media tab.

I don't know what to do. Is there an easier way to view the history?

No, Twitter sucks and is awful and the worst thing to ever happen to art and particularly the preservation thereof. Good luck.

Not wiling to experiment with this myself, but try using the search feature with the query "from:{handle} filter:media" and it should give the same result as the Media tab. Pretty sure Twitter's search feature is a little more conductive to infinite scroll... unless something changed in the past few years.

From my experience the search is limited as well. I've had success with adding a time constraint to only show posts before the last visible one, but that was a while ago and might be broken as well.

Also, be aware that the media tab doesn't show images the author sends in reply to other tweets. I imagine the intention is to filter out meme replies etc, but I also know enough artists that reply with alt versions or post comics like that.

Getting everything from twitter when the account his large like this is a futile effort.

wat8548 said:
No, Twitter sucks and is awful and the worst thing to ever happen to art and particularly the preservation thereof. Good luck.

That's a bit of a stretch but ok.

That aside, OP have you tried using a script or program like gallery-dl? https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl
It really comes in handy when downloading large galleries or bulks for archiving.

When it comes to accounts with this much content it's going to be hell getting the content, if it's even possible at all. Pretty much everything is a half-measure now and even tools like gallery-dl are struggling to keep up with actually having a good, functional scraper.

If you really want to upload that much art you might be better off asking the artist if they can supply it to you.

azero said:
That's a bit of a stretch but ok.

I'd challenge you to come up with something worse than Twitter. BlueSky might mangle the image quality more, but it at least has a functional API. And it's from the founder of Twitter, so I guess we can technically blame Twitter for its existence too.

earlopain said:
From my experience the search is limited as well. I've had success with adding a time constraint to only show posts before the last visible one, but that was a while ago and might be broken as well.

Oh yeah, a query like "from:utxshapeshifter until:2017-10-16 filter:media" works for a little bit... Worth a shot?

couple of e6 users roasting twitter into a fresh chicken aside, the best tool i've ever get to obtain is wfdownloader.xyz. you have to strictly follow the tutorial and video to get it working perfectly, most importantly toggle "above 1000 tweets" setting to practically download everything without the pain of going through search!

Try WFDownloader App. I've used that to quickly scrape the Media tab of some artist Twitters, and it does seem to go back all the way. After the "last 1000" cutoff, the app's status changes to something like "checking older posts," so probably what Earlopain said about using date search constraints. For example, I used this app for my "Project Tush", where I replaced a lot of our old Tush art from FA with superior Twitter versions. You don't think I actually scrolled back to Tush's 2016 Twitter posts to find this replacement, right?

I do not know if Twitter's recent change to the Media tab's layout affects the app in any way. I'm pretty sure the app hasn't been updated since the Media tab's layout change. Yeah, no comment about that on their Twitter. I haven't used the app since the Media tab change. I'm guessing it's unaffected.

Also, for usability and sourcing, the app's default file naming uses the post's Twitter ID number, so you can infer Twitter source links from the filenames.

Twitter post URL:
https://twitter.com/<account name>/status/<post ID>
Filename:
<post ID>

Simply replace the post ID of any Twitter post URL, and you will be taken to the source. The account name can be anything and will switch to the post's current account name.

Does that effect nitter too? If not you can try that

wolfmanfur said:
Does that effect nitter too? If not you can try that

Yeah, you can run your own Nitter instance. Scraping a Nitter instance someone else runs is a big no-no, though. ;)