Using this instead of Takeout

[aronsky]

Hi. First of all, thank you so much for this toolkit - it's fantastic and indispensable, especially now with Google shutting of proper API access to Google Photos for good.

I'm in the process of moving away from Google Photos (or at least trying to), and the first hurdle seems to be that Google Takeout only contains my photos - not those photos shared with me (but not saved to my library). So I'd like to use GPTK to download all my photos instead (including those shared with me). So far, I got the media info (not extended) of all the photos, grouped by albums, and that's all fine and dandy. However, the total amount of photos I'd need to download would be in excess of 200GB, and I'm wondering whether there's any risk that Google will flag such an automated download and block my access.

Are there any experiences with such massive use of the download API? Any hivemind wisdom regarding such approach?

[xob0t]

HI!
While I have not tried this yourself, I guess downloading 200Gb from GP's web UI (which is the same as using GPTK) is totally fine.
In addition to urls in itemInfo, there are two methods in GPTK's api to download files - https://github.com/xob0t/Google-Photos-Toolkit/blob/main/src/api/api.js#L431-L436
Both can download multiple files as a single zip.

And I just noticed getDownloadToken is broken, will fix it asap.

[aronsky]

Thanks!

Yeah, my plan is to get the extended metadata for each image (bummer that there's no batch mode for that), and then use getDownloadUrl and download the photo/video itself. Just worried that doing it continuously for hours will raise some red flags at Google.

[xob0t]

bummer that there's no batch mode for that

Indeed, but it does not seem to exist in web api.

getDownloadToken is fixed in v2.5.6

I Just tested them both, getDownloadUrl returns a URL without a Content-Length header. If you want to track download progress, I would suggest using getDownloadToken.