10 Years

[mikf]

On this day, exactly 10 years ago, the very first gallery-dl commit happened: f738f3a. And here we are, 67,500 LOC, nearly 6,000 commits, and 160 releases later.

It all started with me wanting to archive a few Pixiv artist's works to preserve them in case they got deleted. Downloading ExH galleries using only image limit points without having to spend credits or GP was also something I was interested in, as well as grabbing images from bigger boorus and sites I was visiting regularly. So I combined all my download scripts into one single project, called it "gallery-dl" since its concept was quite similar to youtube-dl, and for whatever reason decided to share the code on GitHub.

I certainly learned quite a lot over the years, much of which I never imagined having to involve myself with: Docker, Workflow automation, Windows' peculiarities to name a few. And while having to deal with pointless website "updates", ever stricter rate limits, Cloudflare, over-and-over reoccurring user problems, etc can be rather frustrating, I'd consider this project as an overall very positive endeavor.

I was planning on starting development on v2.0 at the beginning of this year, but then IRL happened, I got really sick at the end of January, and the first half of 2024 was just an all around miserable experience on my end. It doesn't help that I'm now 10 years older than when it all started. Things are looking up and getting better, though, and will hopefully stay this way for the foreseeable future.

At this point, I'd like to extend a big thank you to all 100+ contributors, everyone who supported me financially, and everyone who stuck around and helped with resolving issues and answering questions.

On to the next 10 years.

[amayra]

You nearly gave me a heart attack because I thought this was a disconnecting announcement from you

[Ammar-Sadaoui]

thanks for your hard work. we really appreciate it

because of you, i get to archived many of my favorite things online that will be lost or DMCAed

[thatfuckingbird]

Thank you very much for all the work you are doing, and especially the thankless and grueling job of keeping up with ever shittier and more restrictive websites. gallery-dl is one of the few programs that not only solves a very difficult problem, but does it while also being all around excellent: reliable, gives the user as much power as possible, avoids all dark patterns and misfeatures. This is a very exclusive category, the only other downloader software I can say this about is yt-dlp, which has a lot more manpower and resources behind it.

[Hrxn]

Time flies, huh.

Congrats @mikf for the journey so far, and for setting a great example of an open source project.

I will gladly stick around for future. I might've missed some activity (issues, questions) in the last two weeks or so, because I had to disable notifications for this repo in trying to solve a github notification bug that has been seriously triggering me. And it did not even help so far.
Sigh.

[Soeroah]

This program has been a lifesaver for me, and got me more or less comfortable with using python-based command line programs to do a few other things that have saved me a ton of time, like video downloading or transcription. If it weren't for gallery-dl I dunno how I'd have coped with my neurotic tendencies these last few years, lol.

Appreciate it all.