4chan-picrel

This is a fork of the 4chan-downloader script. It retains most functionality from the original script, with considerable improvements:

It adds a GUI interface for ease of use;
It records which files have been downloaded in each thread to a json file, therefore making continuosly montioring a thread optional;
It solves a redundancy of the original script, that by default duplicated all threads;
It makes the documentation clearer.

Install

Have Python
Install requirements.

GUI Interface

Double-click on picrel-gui.py and you are good to go.

This is based on PySimpleGUI. It interacts with the main download script allowing the user to avoid commandline instructions. The script can be also used directly, of course, as preferred.

Main Download Script

The main script is called picrel.py.

usage: python picrel.py [-h] [-c] [-d] [-l] [-n] [-r] [-t] [-m] thread/queue

positional arguments:
  thread/queue              url of the thread (or queue text file which contains one url per line)

optional arguments:
  -h, --help          show this help message and exit
  -c, --with-counter  show a counter next the the image that has been
                      downloaded
  -d, --date          show date as well
  -l, --less          show less information (surpresses checking messages)
  -n, --use-names     use thread names instead of the thread ids
                      (...4chan.org/board/thread/thread-id/thread-name)
  -r, --reload        reload the queue file every 5 minutes
  -t, --title         save original filenames
  -m, --monitor       keep monitoring a fast thread

The script creates a /downloads/<board name>/<thread id or thread name>/ folder where all media files are saved.

A list of all downloaded files is progressivley recorded in downloaded_files.json, which is saved within the same folder.

To re-download all files again, you can just delete the json file and re-run the script.

To re-download single files, just delete the respective lines inside the json file and re-run the script.

You can parse a queue file instead of a thread url. In this file you can put as many links as you want, you just have to make sure that there's one url per line. A line is considered to be a url if the first 4 letters of the line start with 'http'.

The queue file can also be generated via the Queue List Creator. See below.

Requirements

In order to use the GUI, you need to install PySimpleGUI.

The Beautifulsoup4 and Django libraries are also required.

Best way to go about this is to open terminal from the script directory and run: pip install -r requirements.txt

Queue List Creator

Double click on queue-creator-gui.py and you are good to go.

This script searches 4chan for your query and generates a queue list text file, which can be used by the main script to simultaneusly download media files from several threads. The user can specify several criteria to generate the list.

usage: python queue-creator.py [-q] {search term} [-f] {file name} [-b] {board name} [-n] {name of the search} 
    [-u] [-a] [-d] {specify whether to save the queue file under a board/directory path}

arguments:
  -q, --query         the search terms(supports regex). This is required.
  -f, --queuefile     the name and extension of the queue file. This is required.
  -b, --board         the board name to search within
  -n, --naming        name of the search (can be later used to name the directory where to save the threads)
  -u, --thread-url    base urls of the chan boards  (default: https://boards.4chan.org/{board}/thread/{id}/{name})
  -a, --api-url       base url of the chans api (default: https://a.4cdn.org/{board}/catalog.json)
  -d, --directory     use or create the {board}/{name} directory, and place the queue file there