Copperminer – A Gallery Ripper

A hassle-free GUI tool to recursively download full-size images from any Coppermine-powered gallery—plus other sites using a simple rules engine (ThePlace2 and LiveJournal photos included). No thumbnails, no junk—just the real full-size images, organized in folders to match the site’s gallery structure. Perfect for backing up fan galleries before they disappear.

Features

• Point-and-click GUI — No command line needed, always-on dark mode
• Intelligent discovery — Enter any gallery root or album URL (supports Coppermine and rule-based sites like ThePlace2 or LiveJournal photos)
• Album tree — Finds and displays all real albums for selection, ignoring “Last uploads”, “Most viewed”, and other virtual/special albums
• Optional special galleries toggle — Include “Last uploads”, “Most viewed”, etc. only when you want them
• Preserves structure — Downloads images into folders/subfolders that match the gallery’s layout
• Download progress & log — See what’s happening at every step
• Select/Unselect all and Stop buttons — Quickly manage or cancel downloads
• Resizable log panel — Drag to change how much space the log uses
• 4chan support — Browse boards and threads to bulk download all attached media
• Adaptive scraping engine — Handles custom Coppermine themes, multi-page albums, custom anti-hotlinking, and referer requirements
• Smart caching engine — Saves each page and image list with ETag/Last-Modified info. Quick scans use HEAD requests so only changed pages are re-scraped.
• History dropdown — Quickly reopen recently scanned galleries from cache
• “Mimic human behavior” — Adds random pauses between downloads to avoid hammering servers (toggle in the GUI)
• Windows double-click support — via start_gallery_ripper.bat
• One-click self-update from Git — pull new commits and restart automatically
• Compatible with Python 3.10+

4chan Usage

Enter 4chan by itself to browse all boards, or paste any 4chan board or thread URL. Double-click a board to open it. Use the Back button to walk back up the navigation stack. Threads show a checkmark when fully downloaded or [+n] for new files. After a download finishes, the tree refreshes to reflect the new status. Selecting a thread downloads all attached files (images, webms, mp4s) into a 4chan/<board>/<subject> (id) folder structure.

Limitations

• Supports Coppermine and a small set of rule-based sites (initially ThePlace2 and LiveJournal photos): other galleries may fail
• No thumbnails or junk: heuristically skips thumbnails and UI icons to save only the original images
• Not for commercial use: See license below

Installation

1. Install Python 3.10 or newer. Download here.

2. Clone or download this repository.

3. On Windows, run setup_gallery_ripper.bat to set up everything. Launch with start_gallery_ripper.bat. To update later, either run update_gallery_ripper.bat or click Update from Git inside the app.

4. On other platforms, follow these manual steps:

   Create and activate a virtual environment:

   python3 -m venv .venv
   # Activate with:
   # Windows:
   .venv\Scripts\activate
   # macOS/Linux:
   source .venv/bin/activate

   Install dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

5. Run the application:

   On Windows, double-click start_gallery_ripper.bat

   On any platform:

   python gallery_ripper.py

License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
See LICENSE for details.