Have you ever wanted to download all the high resolution images in a particular subreddit, or perhaps from all the subreddits in a particular category? Turns out, it’s easier than one would imagine, using standard Linux tools.

Prerequisites

  • A list of subreddits to download images (or other data) from. We can work with some wallpaper subreddits for this example:

subreddits.txt:

wallpapers
wallpaper
Offensive_Wallpapers

I’ve tried this approach on a category consisting of 350+ subreddits, and ran into zero issues.

  • This reddit-dl script by Nicola.

  • The command-line JSON processor jq.

  • A loop.

for x in $(/bin/cat subreddits.txt); do mkdir -p ~/wallpapers/$x; cd ~/wallpapers/$x && reddit-dl $x; done

It’s quite fast as well, and soon your directory structure will look like this:

3.7G	.
2.1G	./wallpapers
1.2G	./wallpaper
424M	./Offensive_Wallpapers

That’s 1714 high resolution wallpapers downloaded in a few minutes.