#Goodbye, DeviantArt!

Between AI generated content being presented alongside real artwork, the option of disallowing your artwork from being used as training data being something you need to seek out for submitted works, rather than a global setting, the horrible user interface, and the many bad decisions which somehow made a bad website worse¹, I've decided to finally quit DeviantArt once and for all.

I'm already through with dealing with platforms I dislike, and provide no value to me. That is why I've gone as far as deactivating my Twitter account earlier this year, despite having gotten a considerable following over the years. I am no longer interested on keeping myself shackled to these social media websites. I still use Discord because nobody is seriously willing to switch to something like Matrix or Telegram just for me.²

DeviantArt is a little different, however, in that it was the very first platform I've started posting artwork to, and, from there, building bonds in. My first DeviantArt account was created back in 2012, when I was thirteen years old, and I eventually deleted that account, which means I've lost a little bit of history. You see, the only reason I had not deleted my DeviantArt account until now is because I don't want that to happen again, I want to have all my content safe and in my hands before I can dispose of the account. And, honestly, until I started using PostyBirb to submit my artwork to all my galleries at once, I had forgotten completely that I even had a DeviantArt, it was no longer important for me. I just want my old artwork on my drives before nuking it.

#Getting my stuff back

Of course, DeviantArt does not provide a simple way to download my entire gallery quickly... That's just the sort of thing that would make deactivation a lot more attractive. Thankfully, it didn't take much searching to find a solution.

I am an avid user of yt-dlp, a fork of youtube-dl. It's probably the one command-line tool that I could probably convince the average Windows user to incorporate into their daily life just because of how simple and how useful it is. It will download videos from a vast selection of video hosting websites, and not just YouTube, as its name would imply, you can also download entire channels or playlists just by passing its URL as an argument to the yt-dlp program. This is made for videos, though, not for downloading galleries from art websites, so surely there must be an equivalent for this purpose?

gallery-dl is a tool that came from the heavens, for people who want to archive galleries of content that is probably not as safe and wholesome as "artwork I did while I was a kid," especially if you take some time to check their supported sites... Well, I appreciate the work that has gone into it regardless, and it'll probably still get a lot of use from me past this initial test run.

To get gallery-dl, I just installed it with pip

pip3 install gallery-dl

From there, I just ran the following command:

gallery-dl https://www.deviantart.com/catusfelony/gallery/all --sleep 10 --write-metadata --no-skip

This started downloading the entirety of my gallery -- 297 images -- from newest to oldest.³ When I got back to my computer, my entire gallery was now under gallery-dl/deviantart/catusfelony, along with some metadata about each submission, such as its title, when it was first submitted, and even the amount of favourites each piece has gotten.

#And that's it!

My DeviantArt account was now safe to nuke. Good riddance!⁴

If you used to watch me, but only on DeviantArt (at which point it is unlikely you'd wind up here,) or if you do not yet follow me on any of the platforms I am actively using, check out my links. I promise you Bluesky isn't that bad.