Social media profiles playbook

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Collect and preserve what a public profile shows: posts, media metadata and archived copies

beginnerabout username, url5 toolslicence CC-BY-4.0
Contents 4/5
  1. 1 Social media profiles playbook
  2. 2 Scope and legal
  3. 3 Profiles
  4. 4 Videos, images and their metadata
  5. 5 Preserve
Tools (5)

Tools used in this guide

  • sherlock Finds accounts by username across 400+ social networks and websitesot install osintverse-community/sherlock
  • yt-dlp Extracts metadata from videos and channels on YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram and 1,000+ other sitesot install osintverse-community/yt-dlp
  • gallery-dl Lists the images and metadata of posts and galleries on Reddit, Flickr, Imgur, Tumblr and 300+ sitesot install osintverse-community/gallery-dl
  • waybackpy Finds the oldest or newest Wayback Machine capture of a URL, or every archived URL of a siteot install osintverse-community/waybackpy
  • unfurl Breaks a URL into everything it encodes: timestamps, IDs, search terms, tracking and session dataot install osintverse-community/unfurl

Install them all:

ot guide tools osintverse-community/social-media-profiles

Videos, images and their metadata

Videos and channels

ot run osintverse-community/yt-dlp --url "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw"

yt-dlp prints the metadata the site holds for a video (or the first 20 videos of a channel or playlist): title, description, upload date and time, uploader and channel ID, duration, view and like counts, tags, chapters, thumbnails and, where the site has them, location and subtitles. Nothing is downloaded.

Image posts and galleries

ot run osintverse-community/gallery-dl --url "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tour_Eiffel_Wikimedia_Commons.jpg"

gallery-dl lists the files of a post, album or profile (the first 20) with the post metadata and the URL of each original file. Feed those URLs to osintverse-community/exif-meta and the image playbook.

IDs hidden in URLs

Post and share URLs often encode IDs and timestamps:

ot run osintverse-community/unfurl --url "https://twitter.com/x/status/1234567890123456789"

For X (Twitter), Discord and other platforms that use snowflake IDs, unfurl decodes the exact creation time from the ID, even for deleted posts you only have a link to.

Next: preserve.

Published 20 Oct 2026. Read it in a terminal: ot guide read osintverse-community/social-media-profiles; offline: ot guide get osintverse-community/social-media-profiles · Source · Markdown

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