A downloadable app for Windows, macOS, and Linux

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TumblBee

TumblBee is a friendly cross-platform desktop application for exporting your original Tumblr posts and pages. It exports to both Markdown and HTML formats and supports all Tumblr block types, including polls, in both legacy and NPF posts. Back up your posts for safe keeping, browse your own tags in Obsidian, or export your whole blog for uploading elsewhere. Let your posts be yours forever.

(BONUS: There's an Easter egg hidden somewhere in the app. Can you find it? šŸ‘€)

Features

  • Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux
  • Export to Markdown or HTML (styled with Pico CSS)
  • Exports all original posts by default, with options for draft posts, private posts, and pages
  • Exports pages in original HTML or Markdown
  • Supports undocumented polls API
  • Supports asks and reblogs
  • Multiple configuration options

Links

Leave a comment if you found TumblBee useful, and let me know if you do something cool with your export files!

Thanks for supporting indie devs and the open web! āœØ

More information
StatusReleased
CategoryTool
PlatformsWindows, macOS, Linux
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(3 total ratings)
AuthorCari
Tagsblogs, Graphical User Interface (GUI), html, indieweb, markdown, small-web, tumblr, websites
Average sessionA few seconds
LanguagesEnglish
LinksHomepage, Bug Reports

Download

Download NowName your own price

Click download now to get access to the following files:

TumblBee-1.2.5-windows.zip 23 MB
TumblBee-1.2.5-macos.zip 41 MB
TumblBee-1.2.5-linux-flatpak.zip 30 MB

Development log

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Comments

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lil-kitty-cat67 days ago(+1)

This was a great experience! Very easy to set up and use.

Only real constructive feedback I have is that I find that it appending "/tumblbee" to whatever folder I choose to be very annoying. It should be whatever folder I select, period.

Other than that, it was great to use. If I were to recommend more features, I have had to find several other tools to export other things from Tumblr and converting them to Markdown. It would be great of TumblBee did all of it!

  • Blog avatar & backdrop
  • Conversations (aka Chats aka direct messages)
  • Followers and Followings
    • Avatars and descriptions would be dope too!
  • Likes

Thanks again, for both this and TumblMark!

Reply
Cari66 days ago (1 edit)

Iā€™m so glad to hear it was a smooth experience for you! Thank you so much! ā¤ļø

I can definitely understand how the default export folder behavior might be unexpected and frustrating. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! Iā€™m prepping a small bug fix release for sometime this week, so Iā€™ll see about getting some changes added in, as well.

I will also see about getting some of these other feature requests added in as time permits, though I canā€™t make any promises on an ETA!

  • Blog avatars and backdrops: Avatars are already included in HTML exports, and I can very easily append them to Markdown exports, as well. Iā€™ll make sure that backdrops (or ā€œheader imagesā€, as Tumblr calls them) are also included.
  • Conversations: As far as I can tell, these arenā€™t accessible through Tumblrā€™s documented API endpoints. Unless I can find proof to the contrary, these will probably end up being out of scope for TumblBee, as thereā€™s always some risk where scraping is concerned. šŸ˜®ā€šŸ’Ø Sorry about that!
  • Followers and followings: Definitely API-accessible! I will probably offer a choice of export formats here, but let me know if you have a strong preference.
  • Likes: Iā€™m considering building a separate application for handling likes, though again, no ETA as of yet! Watch this space šŸ˜Š
Reply
PCaxolotls136 days ago(+1)

Very cool, thank you for sharing! I'm wondering which size of image it's able to get? In my experience, Tumblr's official archive is able to get the original images, which are hard to get otherwise (https://github.com/cebtenzzre/tumblr-utils/issues/24). Also, JSON would be very useful as an export format if possible! ^^

Reply
Cari136 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks so much for the kind words! šŸ˜Š

TumblBee is designed to always grab the original version of any media thatā€™s passed to it. In newer posts, these original-size media are marked with has_original_dimensions: true, but this field is absent on posts made before the rollout of NPF and the new API (2018). To get around this, Iā€™ve chosen to instead grab the first media file provided for any given block. Since media sizes are returned in descending order, in my testing, this always returns the original media file. If you should see anything different in your testing, though, please do report it as a bug so I can look into it.

JSON format is a great suggestionā€”thank you! Iā€™ll see about getting that added sometime in the next few days!

Reply
Cari135 days ago

Just to make sure Iā€™m developing with the right use case in mind, can you tell me a little bit more about how youā€™d like to use a JSON export? Are you hoping for something that exports in Tumblrā€™s own JSON format, totally unmodified (so TumblBee just serves as a friendlier front end for the API), or would you like to see a modified JSON output with some content processing done, closer to what youā€™d get from the Markdown or HTML exports? Any details you can provide would be a big help! šŸ’•

Reply
PCaxolotls5 days ago

I'm so sorry for missing this! I didn't have email notifications for replies on. T_T I guess I'm thinking of something that could easily be processed later into HTML? As long as all the info is preserved in a useful way, I could hack something around it for my purposes!

Thanks again for making this, and for your reply above about the image sizes, I didn't know some of that!

Reply
MarineHaddock141 days ago (3 edits)

Not a bug but worth mentioning in FAQ; Once you get a "limit reached" message clicking "start export" will make it delete all its progress.

Closing and reopening will result in "failed to get user info from Tumblr"

Reply
Cari141 days ago(+1)

Whoops, definitely an oversightā€“thanks for flagging it! Iā€™ll add a note to the current docs, and Iā€™ll try to get an update out with a fix this week šŸ˜Š

Reply
Cari140 days ago(+1)

Just wanted to follow upā€“version 1.1.0 is now available, which adds the ability to resume unfinished exports. Thanks again for reporting this!

Reply