Archiving media with Linkding

Posted Aug 16, 2025

Over the last year I’ve been getting into selfhosting apps on my own hardware. I’ve had a post about what that looks like in draft for a while now, and maybe you’ll see that at some point. But one thing I’m currently running is the Linkding bookmark manager.

I’ve tried Karakeep as well, but its UI just doesn’t feel right to me. What it does have going for it is the built in video archiving feature: if you bookmark a video, it’ll download an offline copy for you. Linkding does the same thing with HTML snapshots – and better than Karakeep, I might add – but it doesn’t treat media links in any special way, and an HMTL snapshot of a YouTube video page is pretty uninteresting.

Linkding has a REST API, so it’s got a sizable list of community projects built around it. I’ve now made one of the projects on that list: Linkding Media Archiver. It adds a Karakeep-esque video archiving feature by periodically scanning bookmarks for media links and handing them off to yt-dlp.

It adds the media files as attachments to the bookmark itself, so you don’t need a separate interface to retrieve them afterwards: it’s all there within Linkding.

Check it out if you’re a Linkding user!