Download images from the exported VK archive

Published on Jan 27, 2025

Tags: python , vk , vkontakte , data export , image downloader , data hoarding

Recently, I’ve been trying to organize my old garbage (photos, unfinished projects, and all that stuff), and I stumbled upon an archive of my old, now-deleted VK account.

The good thing is that VK provides a service that allows you to download all your data without needing any additional software. I remember having to write a custom Scrapy project just to download all my public stuff before it disappeared.

However, while this archive contains a massive amount (almost frighteningly so) of my personal data, it didn’t include the most important things: my uploaded pictures and the images shared with others in conversations.

The only upside is that the archive still contains working links to the files (even though my account is long gone). So, I decided to download everything I could to store it locally — because you never know what might happen in the future.

And that’s how this repo was made: https://github.com/desuex/vk-downloader.

Feel free to use it as you like — just remember that you’ll need to download your export archive first. This script cannot download data directly from the VK website.