Telegram-Batch-Downloader

Powerful downloader for a vector of channels or groups with options, filters and archiving functionality (i.e. duplication filter)

Features

• Fetch an array of channels, designate a saving path and filter options in a table
• Archiving table with all relevant information of downloaded files
• Writing data into file metadata for effective use in programs (i.e. music players)
• Optional shutdown after end of run

Motivation

When you know channels or groups which contain content of interest, you may want to store them on your computer. It is also useful as the channel, or the app itself, may shut down at any time and its content would be lost.

If you use Telegram a lot, you may know many channels which are cool. So you can list all channels you want to download and set filtering options for each.

Scope

The program is targeted for channels or groups which provide media such as documents, audio files, videos or images.

Instructions

1. You need an API ID and an API hash from Telegram which you can get from here.
2. Save the files from this repository in a folder
3. Open the file task_file.ods and Downloader.py

Task file setup

Firstly, it is essential that the table has Telegram as its sheet name.

In the column channel, add here the channels to be downloaded

In the column Target Path, add here the full paths where the content should be saved. Each path must end with a final backslash \.

In the column Media-Modus, you can add a filter for the typer of media. Available filtering options:

Command	Effect
Audio	Only audio files
Speech	Only speech files
Video	Only video files
Photo	Only photos
PhotoVideo	Only photos and videos

If you want to get all media, leave the cell blank or type in anything else as the above commands (for example a slash /).

In the column Positive-Filter, you can add keywords, seperated by comma, which fetch only content where those keyword occur in text/caption. Matchings are case-insensitive.

Example 1: If you want to download media in a channel containing conspiracy theories, and you want only things on 9/11 conspiracies, you could list here: 9/11,911,9-11,plane,flight,world trade center,WTC,tower

Example 2: If you target a channel that provides military news, and you only want content of certain ships, a possible list is: aircraft carrier,destroyer,speed boat

Example 3: If you target an art channel that shares all kind of things art related but you want only images from Monet, Rimbaud and Baudelaire and all kind of images from the renaissance, you could set Media-Modus:Photo and as Positive-Filter: monet,rimbaud,baudelaire,renaissance.

Downloader file setup

1. Paste your API ID and API hash in the designated fields.
2. Set the value for limit which indicates how many files you want to download. It downloads in order from the most recent one. Set None if you want to get all. Be aware that content can be big in size, think of large videos. In such case, you can do one run with a resonable amount for limit, let it finish, and the next day you incraese limit, do a consecutive run and so forth. Through the archiving functionality, files already downloaded will be skipped.
3. Set shutdown and beeptone each to True or False , the former shutting down the computer when finished while the ladder makes a beep when finished.
4. Set the paths: task_file_path points to the task file, archive_file_path where the archive file is located or will be created, and backup_folder if you want that a backup of the archive file will be created after each run. These paths pointing to a file do not have a final backslash \.

When you're done, run the downloader file and the program starts.

Examining the archive file

On the first run, when there is no archive file, it will be created. The archive file contains practically all information of the files which have been downloaded. After each run, the file is set to write protected. To check which files have already be downloaded, the program looks into the column id, which is a unique ID for each item in a channel or group. In case you want to edit the file (deleting a row for example would mean that this file would be downloaded again), then de-select write protection in the file properties before opening. After saving, you must not re-activate write protection again.

Development setup

Required external libraries are

• Telethon: https://github.com/LonamiWebs/Telethon
• Pandas: https://github.com/LonamiWebs/Telethon

pip install telethon
pip install pandas

Downloading can be rather slow.

I recommend to install cryptg so that decrypting the received data is done in C instead of Python, which is much faster.

pip install cryptg

Encouragement

Notify me when there's any error or bug.

Future Work

It is planned to add a negative filter (downloading all but excluding a keyword matching pattern) and a size filter.

Meta

Author: Jonas Dossmann

Distributed under the AGPL-3.0 license.

https://github.com/dossma/