FBMessageScraper

A forked repo of the original FB Message Scraper. I updated it to Python 3, moved code around, edited output format and made it to work in a more user friendly (IMO) way, without the need to give everything by command-line arguments. Original code was pretty spaghetti IMO.

So this is a simple python script to download the entire conversation from Facebook, not limited like the one in the data dump provided by Facebook. After downloading messages, downloading all photos is possible.

Outputs the conversation in a user-friendly easy to read JSON format, as well as the raw JSON for each individual chunk.

This is a fork of the following repository: https://github.com/RaghavSood/FBMessageScraper.

Config setup

1. In Chrome/Firefox, open facebook.com/messages and open any conversation with a fair number of messages.
2. Open the network tab of the Developer tools.
3. Scroll up in the conversation until the page attempts to load previous messages.
4. Look for the POST request to thread_info.php.
5. You need to copy certain parameters from this request into the config.json:
   • Set the cookie value to the value you see under Request Headers
   • Set the __user value to the value you see under Form Data
   • Set the __a value to the value you see under Form Data
   • Set the __dyn value to the value you see under Form Data
   • Set the __req value to the value you see under Form Data
   • Set the __rev value to the value you see under Form Data
   • Set the fb_dtsg value to the value you see under Form Data
   • Set the ttstamp value to the value you see under Form Data

You're now all set to start downloading messages.

Downloading messages

1. Get the conversation ID for those messages by opening clicking on your partner's profile picture, and checking the URL. The number sequence is their Facebook ID. If it's not a numerical ID, go to FindMyFbID. Copy it.
2. For group conversations, the ID can be retrieved from the messages tab, as part of the URL.
3. Launch dumper.py and enter conversation ID. Additionally you can supply conversation name, chunk size and offset. Custom config file can be provided via command-line argument.

Messages are saved by default to messages/{id or supplied_name}/

Downloading photos

1. Download all messages with dumper.py for the chat you want.
2. Open the network tab of the Developer tools.
3. Open Facebook Messages, go to any chat and open any photo.
4. Look for POST request which starts with /webgraphql/query/?query_id=...
5. Copy query_id from there e.g. 909417132156716.
6. Open image_dumper.pym, enter folder name of downloaded messages and then enter query_id.

Photos are saved by default to messages/{id or supplied_name}/img with date as file name.

The same Query ID can be used for several days to download photos.