Quick Start

Vesper Orbit is a macOS desktop application that crawls a single domain and downloads its media (PDFs, images, audio, video) into a clean per-site folder. This guide walks through installation and your first scan in under five minutes.

1. Requirements

2. Install Vesper Orbit

  1. Download the correct .dmg from the Vesper Orbit page: the Apple Silicon build (arm64) for M-series Macs, or the Intel build for older Macs.
  2. Open the .dmg and drag Vesper Orbit to your Applications folder.
  3. Launch Vesper Orbit from your Applications folder. On first launch, macOS may ask you to confirm you want to open it - click Open.
Not sure which build to download?
Click the Apple menu → About This Mac. If the Chip line says Apple M1, M2, M3, or M4, you want the Apple Silicon build. If the Processor line names an Intel chip, you want the Intel build.

3. Run Your First Scan

  1. Launch Vesper Orbit. The idle screen shows the URL field, the scan scope selector, the four media-type pills (PDFs, Images, Audio, Video - all on by default), and toggles for subdomains, exclusions, the manifest and the folder layout.
  2. Type or paste the address you want. A bare domain (example.org) is fine - Orbit will prefix https:// for you.
  3. Choose a scope. Full Site crawls the whole domain. Single Page scans only the address you entered and never follows a link to another page, while still capturing every media file that page references. If you want the PDFs on one publications page, this is the setting you want.
  4. Toggle off any media types you don't want. The app prevents turning all four off at once.
  5. Click Start scan. Luna (the amber moon at the top of the window) starts animating, and the page count begins climbing.

4. Find Your Output

By default, downloads land in ~/Downloads/ in a per-site folder named after the host plus a timestamp:

~/Downloads/archive-example-org-2026-05-07-1430/
  pdfs/
  images/
  audio/
  video/
  _manifest.csv

Switch Organize by to Site structure and the same files arrive with the path of the page they came from underneath each type folder, as in pdfs/about/board/. Useful when one scan covers many sections of a site.

Open _manifest.csv in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets to see every URL Orbit attempted, where it landed locally, and any status flags (ok, too_large, error, skipped_type). See Output Structure for the full reference.

5. Stop or Close Mid-Scan

Click Stop scan at any time to abort cleanly - everything captured so far is saved. If you close the window or quit Vesper Orbit during an active scan, Orbit will ask whether to keep scanning or stop and close. Keep scanning is the default.

Next Steps