As everyone eventually will as the internet gets older, I know a few dead people. Obviously I don’t have access to their account, I can just see their tweets and photos that they left public. I have tried to archive them using www.archive.is which does correctly archive what it can see at the users account, but obviously twitter will not load the entire account history at first, you gotta keep manually scrolling down to load more and more and more of their posts through the years. Of course www.archive.is also won’t open all their photos and manually download those either. Does there exist some tool that would download whole public twitter accounts in the way I describe? When I google it all I get are ways for you to download something from within your own account.
They are probably already archived on archive.org. Search the twitter profile url on web.archive.org and go to the “URLs” section.
I found this old Reddit thread (teddit link) in which a commenter four months ago recommended WFDownloader, I haven’t tried it but several commenters on the original thread have said they’ve used it to success.
Note that Twitter is a mess right now, so any method you’d use (even going through and manually saving everything) is probably going to run into some issues.
EDIT: Also note that this is for images and video only.
I have archived a dead friends tweets before. There used to be tools online that allow you to download an excel sheet of only up to the latest 3200 tweets, but with the API changes, I think a lot of them shut down.
There is however this service that I used because I wanted all the tweets. It cost me about $150-$200. The reason I think this might still work is because I suspect that they may have their own scraping tools and not relying on the API.
It is pricey but that’s the only possibility I know may still work. I paid because I desperately wanted them.
Maybe someone wrote something in GitHub that could help.
A quick search on Google shows a few Reddit threads discussing the same issue. There’s mention of a Twitter Media Downloader Chrome Extension. I’m not a Twitter user myself, so I don’t know how the new walls put up recently will affect your efforts. Best of luck.
