How to download the text that the instagram post was made with?

[Miroslav-Cetojevic]

There's an account that creates homebrewed content for a TTRPG, where the image is the visual representation and follows with a textual description. How do I get the latter with gallery-dl?

[mikf]

Use a metadata post processor with "mode": "custom" and let it write the contents of description.
Basically #1928 (comment), but with {description} instead of {content}

[Miroslav-Cetojevic]

Would it work, if I set metadata to false, add the post processor as described in your link and override the metadata to true in the terminal? The reason for this is I don't want do download the descriptions for each instagram site I use gallery-dl on, just a select few. I would rather not have to edit the conf file every time it's required, because I will just forget to do it.

[mikf]

Would it work, if I set metadata to false, add the post processor as described in your link and override the metadata to true in the terminal?

No, it wouldn't, but there are other ways of accomplishing that.

• Create a separate config file with only the post processor in it and load it with -c to enable it.
• Add a filter to the post processor and check if it's the right username/owner_id
• [Bug?][Feature request?] postprocessors.metadata firing when set to POST even without --write-metadata flag #1583 (comment) and 83fc4c1
  You can define post processors with custom names in a global postprocessor block (next to extractor, downloader, output) and enable them with -P/--postprocessor

[Miroslav-Cetojevic]

So I have followed your advice, made a separate conf file named gallery-dl-post.conf and put the following code inside:

{
  "extractor": {
    
    "postprocessors": [
      {
        "name": "metadata",
        "event": "post",
        "mode": "custom",
        "whitelist": ["instagram"],
        "filename": "{post_shortcode}_by_{username}.html"
      }
    ],
    
    "instagram": {
      "username": "user.name",
      "password": "random string",
      
      "directory": ["{category}"],
      "filename": "{post_shortcode}_by_{username}.{extension}",
      
      "sleep": 1.0,
      "sleep-request": 10.0,
      
      "metadata": true
    }
  }
}

Commandline went like this

gallery-dl -o directory=[] -o videos=false -c gallery-dl-post.conf -P metadata https://www.instagram.com/some.account/ -d "C:\Path\to\dest"

And I get the following error:

[postprocessor][error] 'metadata' initialization failed:  AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'startswith'

On top of that, the downloads resume, but instead of creating html files with the appropriate post description it creates a json that is named like the image file, but with json appended:

CU0FVkhIKtQ_by_lab.of.inspiration.jpg
CU0FVkhIKtQ_by_lab.of.inspiration.jpg.json

How to fix this?

[mikf]

The error is due to a missing format for the metadata post processor, which is required when using "mode": "custom". The .json files come from the default metadata post processor, which you've enabled with -P metadata (there can be multiple metadata post processors active at the same time; -P metadata here is just the same as --write-metadata)

Try the following and use -P insta-meta when you want to write description texts.
(insta-meta can be changed to whatever you want, but I wouldn't use metadata as that would overwrite how --write-metadata works)

{
  "postprocessor": {
    "insta-meta": {
      "name": "metadata",
      "event": "post",
      "mode": "custom",
      "format": "{description}\n",
      "filename": "{post_shortcode}_by_{username}.html"
    }
  },
  "extractor": {
    "instagram": {
      "username": "user.name",
      "password": "random string",

      "directory": ["{category}"],
      "filename": "{post_shortcode}_by_{username}.{extension}",

      "sleep": 1.0,
      "sleep-request": 10.0,

      "metadata": true
    }
  }
}

It is also not necessary to put this into a separate config file. Just copy the postprocessor block and add it to your regular config file.
The three points from #1933 (reply in thread) were meant to be used individually, i.e. only one at a time, not all at once.

[Miroslav-Cetojevic]

Thank you, this worked perfectly.