How does one download only metadata from favorite galleries?

[BradKML]

Asking this to try and construct an art influence graph (within Python). The data to gather includes the link of each piece of art, and also the artist who made it. Note: When it comes to Pixiv, the artist pages are labeled by ID rather than username.

[mikf]

On the command-line this would be
gallery-dl --no-download -o url-metadata=url --write-metadata URL

This will put metadata and file URL in a separate .json file for each file that would get downloaded.

In Python it would be something lke

from gallery_dl.job import DataJob

url = "..."
job = DataJob(url)

job.run()
# all metadata is in job.data

or you iterate over the Extractor results yourself:

from gallery_dl import extractor

url = "..."
extr = extractor.find(url)

for msg in extr:
    # process 'msg'

msg or the items in job.data are 2-tuples or 3-tuples with the metadata dict as last element.