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I got some bug reports and feature requests #51
Description
I use the portable version of the program in windows 10.
1- Before downloading playlists or albums, we can't choose what to download and quality. Program downloads everything with Global quality from the settings, forcing me to tweak it very oftenly because I don't want to download every playlist with the same quality, and choosing different quality for different videos in a playlist is not possible.
2- Program creates too many folders. 1 or 2 folder is fine. "GalleryDL" folder and the folder with the websites name are unnecessary. Can you add an option to disable these created folders?
3- Even if there is nothing to restore, starting the program shows "Restoring prvevious session, please wait" text on the bottom.
7- When something is downloaded, "tmp" folder is created at Downloads. Why? Can we disable this?
13- Should I disable "Convert Audio to a Widely Supported Codec (Slow)"? Why is this enabled? Why isn't the program just download youtube videos directly?
I had these problems too but I solved them :
1- This is the biggest problem. I can't choose the location for cookies.txt unlike in many other downloaders. I use the export cookies.txt from Firefox method, I export the file, with Open Video Downloader, I can choose the location of the file, but I can't choose it with this program.
Another person with cookies problem : #38
Solution : Adding cookies.txt to Internal folder and editing gallery-dl.conf file so it finds cookies.txt.
2- Instagram videos download, but pictures and albums don't, I tried to download albums with both https://www.instagram.com/p/DWtsnZjjcII/?img_index=1 and https://www.instagram.com/p/DWtsnZjjcII/ links, it says "Complete" but nothing is downloaded.
Downloading pictures like this https://www.instagram.com/p/DWZmdUFDGnT/ give me Retry Attempt error.
Solution : Downloading galleries with "Right-Click on Copy pasted URL → Download With → Gallery-dl" solved it. This should've been mentioned in the main guide, it took me a long time to figure this, I thought gallery-dl function would be prioritize over yt-dlp but I was wrong.
These problems are solved :
4- Can we have the option to disable the program showing up on system tray?
5- "Resolution and Quality" doesn't have Instagram.
6- When "Downloading Metadata" finishes with reddit links, program doesn't show the thumbnails.
8- Mouse scrolling is very slow in the settings.
9- Program doesn't remember the size and positioning on the screen after it is closed.
10- Let's say I added 2 different videos, even if I select one of them to highlight it and press "Click to Start Downloads", program downloads both videos. Can you add individual downloading of videos that are added in to the program?
11- Some default settings like "Click to Stop Monitoring" "Click to Download Audio Separately" "Display Link Capture Notifications" should be turned off by default. It took me a while to find these settings to turn off. I think most people would prefer to not have these on.
I would also make Downloads to be the default download location, instead of the Gdownloader's folder.
12- "Restore Previous Session After Restart" should not restore videos that were downloaded. It should restore videos that did not get downloaded.
-This is the only gallery-dl gui on github with more than 20 stars for some reason and it's got a lot of features missing.
Can you add the features that the this program is missing by checking out Open Video Downloader https://github.com/jely2002/youtube-dl-gui ?
Activity
Route Instagram downloads through gallery-dl first.
Add setting to remember window sizes and positions (disabled by default)
hstr0100 commentedon Jul 27, 2026
This will be tackled in a future update. Thanks for pointing it out.
This is meant to keep each downloader in its own folder and each gallery/manga in its own dedicated location. I can think of plenty of reasons why people wouldn't want everything dumped into a single directory that could eventually grow to millions of JPGs and MP4s, including files with conflicting names all ending up in the same place.
What currently gets saved as:
website.com/manga_x/page1
website.com/manga_x/page2
website.com/manga_x/page3
website.com/manga_y/page1
website.com/manga_y/page2
website.com/manga_y/page3
Would instead become:
page1
page1_1
page2
page2_1
page3
page3_1
However, recent versions let you configure all of the directories however you like. You can point them all to a single location and avoid creating any extra folders if you'd prefer.
Noted. This will be addressed in a future update. Right now, that message is shown because the program doesn't yet know whether there's anything to restore. It needs a moment to read its internal database before it can determine if a previous session even exists.
We could probably reword that notification to make it a bit less misleading.
Implemented in newer versions.
Added in recent versions. It's listed as "Instagram Reels", but those settings apply to any videos downloaded from Instagram.
This should be fixed in newer versions, although not all Reddit links support displaying a thumbnail.
This is necessary for the program to function. It's where files are downloaded before being moved to their final destination.
It serves two purposes: keeping partial downloads separate from finished downloads, and making sure there's always enough disk space available for ongoing downloads, since the "tmp" directory shares the same parent directory as the final media files. Downloads won't start if there's not enough space.
Removing the tmp directory would likely mean scattering dozens of
.partfiles among your completed downloads, which, in my experience, is much harder to manage and filter later.We could make the tmp directory hidden or make it configurable, but that comes with its own set of issues. I'll look into the possibilities in a future release.
For now, the "tmp" directory will stay.
Fixed in newer releases. Thank you for reporting it.
Implemented in recent releases. See: General Settings -> Remember Last Window Size and Position.
Implemented in recent versions.
For the people I originally made the program for, they likely wouldn't even know where to find those toggles to enable those features, which is why they're on by default.
It's also one of the first things mentioned in the README that you can download files with a simple Ctrl+C, so shipping the program with that feature disabled would be a bit strange.
In most software, notifications are enabled by default, not disabled. Users need feedback that things are working. Once they understand how the notification system works, they can turn it off if they don't like it.
That would prevent users from restarting downloads after a mishap or managing their downloaded files directly from GDownloader.
That said, you can enable General Settings -> Automatically Remove Successful Downloads to get this behavior.
That's because YouTube uses the Opus codec for audio, which Windows doesn't support natively.
A user would download a video, play it in the default Windows 10/11 media player, hear no audio, and assume GDownloader downloaded a broken file.
That's why this option is enabled by default. Users who have VLC or other better media players installed are also more likely to know how to find and disable that setting.
Does naming the file
gallery-dl_cookies.txtwork? That's the filename GDownloader expects for gallery-dl.I do agree this should be improved in a future update. Users should be able to specify a custom location for that file. Added to my TODO.
Fixed in recent releases. GDownloader now defaults to gallery-dl for instagram (which works for images and videos, whereas yt-dlp only works with videos). Thank you for pointing this out.
It's a personal policy of mine to stay focused on my own work, so I intentionally don't look at other people's projects. That said, if users request a particular feature and it fits the scope of the project, I'd be happy to consider adding it.
Also, gallery-dl support is fairly basic due to limitations in gallery-dl itself. Adding full support for every gallery-dl feature would be a high-maintenance effort because of limitations in its --dump-json output, which we rely on to make things work consistently across every website supported by yt-dlp. I honestly believe this is the main thing holding back most non-Python GUIs built around gallery-dl. Without metadata being exposed in a consistent way, many advanced features either become unreliable or require a large amount of website-specific workarounds to support.
GitAcc53 commentedon Aug 13, 2026
@hstr0100
2- How? From "Extra gallery-dl Arguments"? What should I write there? Do I ask Ai?
7- Can we make it so that tmp folder is created inside the Gallery folder at least? Right now 2 different folders are created in Downloads which is annoying.
13- So I should disable it than, ai says videos will download much faster and audio will have better quality. Is there any other setting that I should know about like this that I should change? I searched "slow" on settings, only other setting with the name "slow" was subtitle related and it was already turned off.
I don't know. I changed my method anyway, for cookies, I do this :
Extra yt-dlp Arguments : "--cookies-from-browser firefox --sleep-requests 0.3 --min-sleep-interval 2 --max-sleep-interval 6"
and
Extra gallery-dl Arguments : "--cookies-from-browser firefox --sleep 2-4"
I pasted an instagram picture gallery post and a youtube video, pressed "Click to Start Downloads", it automatically downloaded instagram pics with gallery, downloaded youtube video with yt-dlp. Even if I didn't past a https://www.instagram.com/reel/???/ url and pasted a instagram video with a link like https://www.instagram.com/p/???/ without /reel/ part, program first showed (gallery-dl) and it switched to (yt-dlp). Does the program scan the link so that it itself chooses which one of yt-dlp or gallery-dl to be used by the gui? If that's the case, it's great.
I've got some new problems :
14 What is "Use original Filenames" in gallery-dl? Why isn't it on?
15 I want 2 or 3 option at "Maximum Download Retries" and "Maximum Fragment Retries", I can only choose between 0 or 5 now, 0 is too little and 5 is too much, it requests too much info from instagram which instagram doesn't like. Maybe you can remove 25, 35, 45 and replace them with 2, 3, 4?
16 When I paste a text on "Search settings", program leaves settings, goes back to the main program and says "The clipboard does not contain any new URLs", a small problem.
17 This problem is very annoying. If an instagram post has both videos and photos (let's say first slide is a video, 2nd, 3rd, 4th are photos), the program fails to download all the media. First it tries to use gallery-dl, which crashes with a "ValueError". Then the program falls back to yt-dlp, but yt-dlp only downloads the first video in the carousel and ignores the photos. Is there any way to successfully download a mixed Instagram gallery (both videos and images) completely?
Should I also ask this :
"If an instagram post has both videos and photos (mixed media carousel), gallery-dl fails to download the post and crashes. It throws this error: "ValueError - dictionary update sequence element #0 has length 1; 2 is required". Is this a known parsing issue with the current Instagram JSON structure, and is there a workaround or a planned fix for it?"
on https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/issues ?
18 We should be able to change the name of the post on the main page after QUERYING is over. Maybe it can be one of the "More Options" options, or at least you can add "right click → Change the name" option.
19 Some videos download with a lower quality with yt-dlp, example :
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcGvDLzE6oD/ this downloads as "Video by battlefield (540x960)" and it is 2mb.
https://github.com/jely2002/youtube-dl-gui downloads it as "Video by battlefield-(1920p)" and it is 7mb and much better quality.
But most of the time Gdownloader also downloads with high quality, for example this link is fine https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcBlgV2ipLq/ it downloads as 1920p, but even this has lower size, on Gdownloader it is 9.51mb, same video downloads with https://github.com/jely2002/youtube-dl-gui is 9.83mb.
Also, your videos doesn't have the url added in to the video files in "Properties → Details → Description". I can check the url with https://github.com/jely2002/youtube-dl-gui downloads, but not with Gdownloader. Maybe things like this effects the size but I doubt it.
In settings, Instagram Reels uses Global Settings and Global Settings quality is "Best Video", so I didn't touch the settings there much.