Google Photos: programatically creating shares?

Feature
1

Hello everyone,

So, after a long hiatus, I'm finally getting back to using rclone to copy a heckaton (a few thousands) of my trip photos from my local drive to Google Photos.

In my local drive, they are already arranged by trip, date, and camera, like:

Trip_Name/Trip_Day/Camera_Name/photo1.jpg, photo2.jpg, etc

Of course, as GPhotos does not support albums within albums, this "tree" gets flattened into a series of albums that all show up in the "Albums" section of the Google Photos WebUI. So far so good.

The hard part is that I now want to share all those dozens of albums with my wife, and the WebUI does not offer (that I can find) a way to select more than one album and share them all in a single operation; it has to be done tediously, one by one.

So, I would like to suggest a new rclone feature to make this easier; something like
rclone mkshare remote:album/albumname, which, when run, would output a shareable link to the album.

This same command could also work for GDrive, providing a shareable link to a file or directory, ditto other remotes that implement such a "share" feature in their API.

BTW, Google Photo's API call for this can be found here: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/reference/rest/v1/albums/share

So, what do you think? Would this be a useful feature? Should I go ahead and open a ticket on github?

Cheers,
-- Durval.

2

OK, searched a little more and found the rclone link command, but it seems not to be working with Google Photos:

rclone link gp:album/REDACTED1/REDACTED2/REDACTED3
2020/06/28 18:42:55 Failed to link: Google Photos path "album/REDACTED1/REDACTED2/REDACTED3" doesn't support public links

Is this a limitation of the current rclone Google Photos remote (ie, not supporting the link command), or am I missing something?

Cheers,
-- Durval.

3

This could be done with the link command which isn't implemented for photos yet.

Can you share an individual photo as well as an album? If so it would fit well into the link command.

4

Hello @ncw,

Can you share an individual photo as well as an album? If so it would fit well into the link command.

From the WebUI, sure. But AFAICS it does so by creating an unnamed album with just the individual photo in it, and then creating a share for it.

Reviewing the API, I see no method for sharing individual pictures (ie, it seems there's no mediaitems.share, only albums.share); that's probably why the Google Photos WebUI does it that way.

Perhaps the (hopefully soon :wink: ) to be implemented rclone link Google Photos could do something similar, thereby remaining, er, 'conceptually compatible' with the WebUI?

Cheers,
-- Durval.

5

Can you open an issue in GitHub with your findings?

The first part, sharing an album seems easy enough so we should give that a go :slight_smile:

6

Sure thing, Nick! Here it is: https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/4398

That would be great! Please let me know if/when you need any help, including testing (I have already gone though the drudgery and manually created the links for the first heckaton of albums resulting from my first upload, but there are many more local photo hierarchies still waiting to be copied you GooglePhotos, so there's no shortage of testing material on my side :slight_smile:)

Cheers, and thanks,
-- Durval.

7

Thanks for making the issue!

I'll respond there.

8

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