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Scraping pages has limitations, and may also be prohibited/banned on the platform depending on how it's done (there are some Terms of Use and permission request
by newscracker 9y ago
Scraping pages has limitations, and may also be prohibited/banned on the platform depending on how it's done (there are some Terms of Use and permission request forms to fill in if scraping is done by programs - I'm not sure if it applies to all kinds of scrapers, including personal ones).
The way digi.me and other similar solutions work is by getting the user to authorize the app and use that authorization with the Facebook APIs to retrieve content. It'd be faster than page scraping, and likely less intrusive (guessing here) on Facebooks Terms of Use.
- mgorenstein 9y agoYeah, I'd like if there were a straightforward way to access the same content via the API, and perhaps this is possible. I was unsuccessful. I'd made an attempt to grab all photos I've ever been tagged in, which I was able to accomplish using the approach I described in my last comment, solely through the API, but was only able to access those photos currently on my timeline (a much smaller set). My suspicion is that services like digi.me similarly won't have access to anything beyond the timeline. Have you used digi.me?
- newscracker 9y agoI have used it more than a year ago, at which time it was restricted to timeline and pages. It has since added exporting content from groups (and probably others). Basically anything allowed by the Facebook APIs is what it aims to support. The downside is that it stores it in its own proprietary database and needs a subscription to continue to use it (though it's quite cheap, and I certainly wouldn't put the price as a factor against it).