Dev Update - FA Gallery Downloader (Patreon)

So, if you follow me literally anywhere else, you'll likely have seen this by now, but I wanted to post it here regardless:

🐾 FA Gallery Downloader is now in v1.0!

The full release has:

• Download any FA gallery (including your own!)
• Gallery viewer (with real-time search, story thumbnail support and TXT/PDF/MP3 embedding)
• Postybirb Export support (for multiple accounts)
• Resume/restart functionality (important for real big galleries)

I saw how FA's leadership was throwing a whole section of their userbase under the bus, establishing very unclear, easily abusable rules (and doubling down on doing so), and the amount of stress and hurt it was causing their community...So I decided to do something about it. Moving sites can be intimidating, especially when you've spent literally years building up a following and gallery on one specific platform. The idea of moving hundreds of submissions manually almost seems impossible...So why not automate it?

Thankfully I was able to tie into Postybirb's new "Import directory" functionality to enable folks to queue uploads to any number of other sites, which will only grow as Postybirb adds support for them. I'm really hoping this will help the community; even if someone doesn't plan on leaving FA right now, it can't hurt to not have all of your eggs in one basket, right?

I can get more into how I built all this in future dev updates if folks are interested! Like a lot of my recent projects, it's all in Javascript/CSS, mainly Node.js using the user's already installed Chromium-based browser (such as Edge on Windows machines), which helps keep the install file relatively small. The database of submission metadata (title, rating, tags, even comments) is an SQLite database.

I spent the better part of a month chipping away at this, and I'm a bit proud of it! I've been getting in a few bug reports here and there (all of which are fixed at this point in time), which is great cause it means people are using it...Nothing makes a programmer happier than folks finding their work useful, haha. X3

So if you've ever thought about branching out from FurAffinity to other sites, maybe this could help you out. Let me know what you think!