Download all posts for Group I have Admin rights to using Facebook Graph API

Question

We are trying to retrieve ALL the posts, with associated comments and images, made to our group in the last year. I've tried using GraphAPI to do this but pagination means I have to get data, then copy the "next" link, and run again. Unfortunately, this means a LOT of work, since there are over 2 million posts to the group.

Does ANYONE know of a way to do this without spending a few days clicking? Also consider that the group has 4000+ members and is growing everyday, with, on average, about 1000 posts a DAY at the moment.

For the curious, the PLAN is to cull the herd... I am HOPELESS at programming and have recently started learning Python...

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 10 '14 at 14:19

6

I made it like this, you'll probably have to iterate through all posts until data is empty. Note this is Python 2.x version.

from facepy import GraphAPI
import json

group_id = "YOUR_GROUP_ID"
access_token = "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"

graph = GraphAPI(access_token)

# https://facepy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/usage/graph-api.html
data = graph.get(group_id + "/feed", page=False, retry=3, limit=800)

with open('content.json', 'w') as outfile:
  json.dump(data, outfile, indent = 4)

answered Feb 10 '14 at 14:19

dh762

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Appreciated! Ill test this tonight!! – Brendan Feb 17 '14 at 21:26
And I run into problems. For whatever reason, Im battling to install Facepy. Gimme a few minutes and Ill get back onto it... – Brendan Feb 19 '14 at 18:52
Where do you get your access token? – Pitto Jun 01 '15 at 18:16
See [this SO post](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7399333/get-access-token-for-a-closed-group-on-facebook-graph-api) – dh762 Jun 02 '15 at 08:41

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 05 '14 at 14:10

I've just found, and used @dfdfdf 's solution, which is great! You can generalize it to download from multiple pages of a feed, rather than just the first one, like so:

from facepy import GraphAPI
import json

group_id = "\YOUR_GROUP_ID"
access_token = "YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN"

graph = GraphAPI(access_token)
pages = graph.get(group_id + "/feed", page=True, retry=3, limit=1000)
i = 0
for p in pages:
    print 'Downloading page', i
    with open('content%i.json' % i, 'w') as outfile:
        json.dump(p, outfile, indent = 4)
    i += 1

Download all posts for Group I have Admin rights to using Facebook Graph API

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