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Comment by mholt | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Major thorn in my side. I spent hours trying to automate that process by using Chrome headless, and it kinda worked, until I realized that I needed to physically authenticate not just once, but every 10 minutes. So, it basically can't be automated since 2FA is needed so often.

In practice, I do a Takeout once or twice a year. (I recommend this even if not using Timelinize, so you can be sure to have your data.)

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I thought you could set up an automatic Takeout export periodically, and choose the target to be your Google Drive. Then via a webapp oauth you could pull the data that way. Frequency was limited (looks like it says the auto export is “every 2 months for 1 year”). So hardly realtime, but seems useful and (relatively) easy? Does a method like that not work for your intentions?

Will have to look into that. Sounds like it could be expensive but maybe worth it.

You can schedule the takeout to Drive, then use a tool such as rclone (amazing tool) to pull it down.

It should not add any costs except the storage for the takeout zip on drive.

Look at supported providers in rclone and you might find easy solutions for some hard sync problems: https://rclone.org/#providers

> except the storage for the takeout zip on drive.

Yeah, that's the cost I'm talking about. It essentially amounts to paying an extra subscription to be able to download your data [on a regular basis].

I'm a big rclone fan btw :) I'm sure there's some future where we do something like this to automate Takeouts.

Downloading from Google drive doesn't cost anything, does it? Although, I guess you would have to have enough empty space on your Google drive to be able to store the takeout zip, which I think is an acceptable cost

Some kind of companion app that runs on my phone and streams the latest data (photos, location history, texts, etc ) back to the timeline would probably be more tractable for live updates. But that is probably a wildly different scope than the import based workflow. This is very cool regardless.

For sure.

About 5-6 years ago, Timelinize actually used only the Google Photos API. It didn't even support imports from Takeout yet. The problem is the API strips photos of crucial metadata including location, and gives you nerfed versions of your data. Plus the rate limits were so unbearable, I eventually ripped this out.

But yeah, an app that runs on your phone would be a nice QoL improvement.

Is takeout the only way to get the original photos out?

As far as I know, yes. ("Original" is a strong word, but it's pretty close if you don't have space saver enabled / pay for storage.)

Syncthing from phone to a directory on PC?

That's what I do. Though I don't then put them into any system. Yet.

How easy would it be to integrate this with immich (instead of needing the access to google photo)?

Probably not hard. Timelinize's data sources have a standard API with just 2 methods [0], so it should be fairly trivial to implement depend on how accessible Immich is.

To clarify, you don't grant access to Google Photos, you just do the Takeout from https://takeout.google.com to download your data first.

[0]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/timelinize/timelinize@v0.0.23/...

I did this by creating my own small password manager.

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