Updates to the Google Photos API: Read-Only Scopes Deprecated | Hacker News Reader

Updates to the Google Photos API: Read-Only Scopes Deprecated

developers.google.com

30 pointstomsonj13 comments

"If your app relies on accessing the user's entire library, you may need to re-evaluate your app or consider alternative approaches."

in other words, no possible way to create third party gallery apps.

My app (which uses Google Photos among other sources to set your Mac / Windows desktop wallpaper) is part of the Google Photos partner program and the “consider alternative approaches” turns out to be not to use Google Photos integration any more according to them. Really disappointing and further proof never to trust a Google product.

Looks like it’s explicitly prohibited in the new developer policy [1]:

> Do not make a substitute for Google Photos. For example, do not use the APIs to create a general purpose photo gallery app.

[1] https://developers.google.com/photos/support/api-policy

It's just so shitty living in an age where software gets worse and worse, where every decision is made by fuedal lords who get to revise their grants ongoingly however they want.

And any attempt to make life better for ourselves is met by felony anti;-crcumvention charges. The legal system has been stacked against humankind.

That's because hackers became too comfortable, nobody creates nothing anymore.

This is really inconvenient for me as well.

It seems like it will affect gphotos-sync, which I have been using reliably for years to backup all my photos...

https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync

Does anybody have good alternatives? I'm quite used to taking photos on my phone and feeling confident they will be backed up from Google Photos. This convenience is one of the few reasons why I still use Google stuff. I even ditched Gmail years ago.

Not entirely what you're looking for, but https://github.com/immich-app/immich has worked well for me, running on my own server.

Flames... Flames from the side of my face. This is an absolute user hostile "Go Fuck Yourself" by Google. There is now no way for a user to enumerate and incrementally back up their photos (read: access their own data). Your application would only be able to see either photos that you create with the backup tool, or that you have explicitly shared with it by hand.

Fuck you, Google.

Yay that ends the Google Photos integration in my Android App. Thanks! :(

huh? users can still use takeout. this just stops third party apps from enumerating all of your photos

why would they need to do that anyway? I wholeheartedly agree with "If your app relies on accessing the user's entire library, you may need to re-evaluate your app".

An app which backs up your photos should support incremental backup, or even background backup. Hell: Google's own app is designed around the premise that it can iterate and automatically upload all of the photos on your mobile phone, not just ones it created or ones manually chosen! Imagine if Apple decided to simply entirely remove the ability to grant an app access to your photo library (as opposed to merely providing alternative options to limit what photos are visible, as they do)... clearly Google should "re-evaluate" their app as well :/.

that's a MediaStore / file API operation, not a photos API operation.

So you are saying there is another Google API which provides the same functionality? I don't understand. If there is, why isn't this article simply suggesting people use that?

(Otherwise, I feel like you are just muddying up the discussion by trying to focus on the branding of specific APIs on different platforms rather than on what functionality is being offered, as if it matters what the APIs are called. Again: if I want to run an app--as many people do--which can incrementally slurp up all of my photos from Google Photos to store elsewhere, I should get to do so, the same way Google writes an app that slurps up all photos in my iOS photos library. If Google wants to shut down access to photos stored in their system without at least acknowledging the hypocrisy, that's pretty awful of them.)

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