Google Photos `media/by-month` and `media/by-year` files are not listed

Help and Support
1

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

I'm trying to sync my daughter's photos from Google Photos to my computer. If I use media/all as source, the files are downloaded, but nothing is returned when I use media/by-month or media/by-year.

The same command works as expected for my account.

Run the command 'rclone version' and share the full output of the command.

rclone 1.60.1

  • os/version: fedora 38 (64 bit)
  • os/kernel: 6.2.15-300.fc38.x86_64 (x86_64)
  • os/type: linux
  • os/arch: amd64
  • go/version: go1.19.3
  • go/linking: dynamic
  • go/tags: none

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

Google Photos

The command you were trying to run (eg rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

rclone sync gphotos-alice:media/by-month ~/Backup/alice/gphotos-by-month --progress -vv

The rclone config contents with secrets removed.

[gphotos-alice]
type = google photos
read_only = true
client_id = REMOVED
client_secret = REMOVED
token = REMOVED

A log from the command with the -vv flag

https://pastebin.com/5bGgPi62
2

hello and welcome to the forum,

please rclone selfupdate and test again.

3

Updated to the latest version, but the output is still the same. It works for my account, but not for my daughter and wife's accounts.

I'm using my own client_id [1], so maybe it's a permission issue due to the scopes I selected:

.../auth/photoslibrary.readonly
.../auth/drive.metadata.readonly
.../auth/drive.readonly

[1] Google drive

4

if your own client_id works for your account then maybe create your spouses own ids as well?

5

But you can copy from media/all on all accounts? So I'd say the auth must be working properly

Do the images in those accounts have metadata? So does google photos know when they were taken?

The googlephotos backend also uses scopes "openid" and "profile" in addition to https://www.googleapis.com/auth/photoslibrary.readonly but I can't remember why!