Media Harvest for X Full review

Media Harvest for X is an open-source browser extension that only works with X (formerly Twitter). It injects a download button under every tweet with media in your timeline. One click saves the video, images or GIF in that tweet to your computer.

It gets two easily overlooked things right. The first is grabbing the original files: X shows compressed images on the page, and the extension swaps the URL to the original-size parameter. For video, it picks the highest-bitrate stream. The second is filename templates: files can be named automatically by author, tweet ID, index and date, so your archive does not fill up with video1.mp4.

Being open source is fairly rare among extensions. Tools like this need broad page permissions, and whether you can audit what it actually does decides whether you should trust it. It does not do whole-account bulk downloads. To export all media from an account, use yt-dlp.

It reads original media URLs from the tweet data

The X web app sends tweet data (including media URLs in every size) to the page. The extension reads that data: for images it changes the size parameter in the URL to the original, and for video it picks the highest-bitrate stream. So what it gets is much sharper than what you get with right-click and save.

Why a button in the page instead of an online service

X keeps tightening limits on anonymous access, and a lot of content is hidden unless you are logged in. The extension runs inside your logged-in session, so its requests look just like normal browsing. That keeps the success rate high and stable. Online services send anonymous requests from data center IPs and often get rejected outright.

Filename templates

It exposes variables such as author, tweet ID, media index and date as a template string. For archiving, this is a must: four images from one tweet need a visible order, and files from different authors need to stay distinct. This is also where it beats "right-click and save".

Breakage and updates

When X changes its page structure, the button can disappear or stop working until the extension updates. Because it is open source, someone usually reports and fixes it quickly in the issues. X has also changed its API and page policies often in recent years, so tools like this are a bit less stable than on other platforms.