Someone who works in tech, the most advanced technology they own is a laser printer from 2005, and they keep a loaded gun next to it in case it makes a funny noise.
https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-photos-picker-ap...
The utm_source=chatgpt.com is amusing.
What Will No Longer Work after March 31, 2025
Accessing albums and media items not uploaded by your app: The Library API will no longer allow access to the elements in a user’s library that were not uploaded by your app. Instead, you can use the Picker API.
https://support.google.com/photos/thread/326122731
https://support.google.com/photos/answer/9458709?sjid=162165...
What a terrible decision by Google.
Rcloning a few years of old photos on Google Photos was on my todo anyway, guess that's happening this weekend.
> Last month, Google announced that Google Photos slideshows would soon be available as ambient displays or screensavers on more third-party devices. The feature is currently available on Google Nest displays and Google TVs.
Sounds like anti-competitive behavior with privacy as the scape goat, imho. A feature for 3rd parties stops working as Google is rolling out that same feature for their own products?
Or maybe they don't even need firmware updates, if it's all managed via the photo frame's website.
API's change, and if you make a product that uses an API, you need to be able to change with it.
If Google is somehow making it technically impossible for the photo frames to auto-update from an album, then that would be really annoying. But it doesn't sound like that?
No one wants to manually add each photo to a slideshow. Google Photos has AI that automatically makes themed albums, it works great. I point my TV at my family photos, new pictures of my family are automatically added as I take them, and then shown on my TV. That is how it is supposed to work.
This new locked down API places all the security burden on the user, and a large % of users are not going to be able to figure out the new system, and the new system is so complicated that many products are just going to give up on working altogether.
The new system, even if well intentioned, should not be rolled out, it is a huge net loss for users.
Per TFA, that's what's happening. "Instead, apps can only access photos or albums through the new Google Photos Picker API, which requires users to manually 'pick' each photo."
But from the official page it says [1]:
> For example, if your asking your users to share a specific album, you could include the following text on the same page your users connect to Google Photos: "Connect to Google Photos, then search for the album you want to share."
This suggests that users are able to share a specific album that shares all photos within, without having to individually select.
It's hard to see why Google would take away the ability to share all photos in an album, when that's such a common use case.
If they have removed that, it's incredibly dumb. I just don't see anything concrete that they have? I'd love to see proof one way or another. Does anyone have access to the picker interface itself? Does it allow you to select an album directly?
[1] https://developers.google.com/photos/picker/guides/picking-e...
https://developers.google.com/static/photos/images/picker-pi...
They also clarify this in the documentation: "Albums, favorites, and other common photos categories are not show [sic] directly. Users can search for photos using various criteria, such as keywords, dates, locations, and album titles"
The user can search for album names, but only the images from those albums are shown, and users can only select individual images. In the screenshots, you can also see that it shows that you can only select up to 2000 images. And you can see in the docs that only Image, Video and Motion type files are returned—there's no album reference that you can grab, and the URLs for these files expire after 60 minutes: https://developers.google.com/photos/picker/guides/media-ite...
If Google really has removed the ability to share all photos from a picked album, that's so idiotic I just don't get it. I don't see what possible benefit there is to security or to Google here. Why would Google screw over users for no reason at all? Companies generally remove features for a strategic reason. They don't upset consumers just for the fun of it.
Also, their blog post [1] clearly states, emphasis mine:
"The Picker API offers a secure and intuitive way for users to search for and select photos and albums through a seamless integration with the Google Photos app."
Does anyone have a link to the actual picker in action? And if it's missing selecting an album, is this intentional or an oversight that will be quickly corrected?
[1] https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-photos-picker-ap...
This isn’t more security, this is google attempting to squeeze more monetization.
Now google is making it cancerous and awful and making it specific photos only. Probably to sell a yet to be announced photo frame lol.
I tried to build a product to help people get a physical backup out of Google Photos but their API had so many rate limits and random other errors it would take _days_ or more: https://www.clonecamel.com
Now, I need to also look at how this will work with my personal backup system that uses rclone to an encrypted USB drive.
It’s annoying in that it can take up to a week for the first mail to reply. And you can’t automate it, so no automatic backups.
But these limits are weird because while file size limits do exist, they don't match Google's limits: 4GB is the limit for regular zip, zip64 has a limit of 16 exabytes. And TGZ's limit of 50GB shows that they they have the internal infrastructure to support building larger files too.
So, other than that most of their customers use Windows and they want to make takeout as annoying as possible, do they put that limit on it?
Also, the fact that they don't mention this difference- the UI is so poorly done that you can only tell that TGZ can go an order of magnitude larger after selecting it in one drop-down and then looking at the other drop down- is a sign of how Google wants to make this as difficult as possible.
The frequent failures to generate my takeout are annoying though.
