Fetch Flipnotes from Flipnote Hatena... in 2021!? 👀
After Flipnote Hatena was closed down, Nintendo converted all user-created Flipnotes to make them accessible from Flipnote Studio 3D's "DSi Library" feature. DSi Library was shut down when Nintendo closed the rest of Flipnote Studio 3D's online features, and along with it all of the content from Flipnote Hatena disappeared.
Or so we thought!
Luckily for us, the amazing folks over at Internet Archive made a partial backup!
This project uses a super-basic Python script to interact with Internet Archive's API and fetch all of the Flipnotes from a given user's Flipnote Studio ID. These Flipnotes can then be browsed and converted to video in Flipnote Player or dropped onto an SD card and viewed in Flipnote Studio 3D on a Nintendo 3DS.
Requirements:
- Python 3, tested on version 3.7.4 but should work on other versions
To find how many Flipnotes are archived for a user's Flipnote Studio ID (e.g. 97849B20AA34FFBC)
python3 flipnote_fetcher.py 97849B20AA34FFBC
To download all those Flipnotes, just pass a target directory as a second param:
python3 flipnote_fetcher.py 97849B20AA34FFBC ./downloads
Unfortunately, we're only able to fetch Flipnotes by Flipnote Studio ID. It’s not possible to search for a specific username, and since Hatena removed old Hatena Star functionality in October of 2020, it's no longer possible to search by Hatena ID either. We also aren't able to retrieve these Flipnotes in a format that's compatible with Flipnote Studio on the DSi.
The archive we're pulling from also only contains a small portion of the data from Flipnote Hatena; around 476,300 Flipnotes out of 44,351,673 in total.
If you’d like more features, and a complete dataset, and you might want to wait for Austin Burk’s much more comprehensive Flipnote Archive project.
- James Daniel for the Python implementation
- Shutterbug2000 who discovered the Internet Archive backup
- IPG for the trick used to match Hatena IDs to Flipnote Studio IDs
- Internet Archive for hosting the actual backup :)