README: add some links, mention Drive sync

pull/2/merge
Brad Fitzpatrick 4 years ago
parent a5e572ba65
commit dc2770d6e5

@ -23,21 +23,30 @@ Why?
We want to incrementally download our own photos out of Google Photos.
Google Photos used to have an API to do this (the Picasa Web Albums API) but
they removed it, replacing it with a new API that doesn't let you download your
original photos. They instead let you download your photos with mangled EXIF,
stripping location (and maybe recompressing the image bytes?).
We can get our original photos out with Google Takeout, but only manually, and
very slowly. We don't want to have to remember to do it (or remember to renew
the time-limited scheduled takeouts) and we'd like our photos mirrored in
seconds or minutes, not weeks.
In https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/issues/1144#issuecomment-525007239, Brad
Fitzpatrick said that we might have to give up on APIs and resort to scraping,
noting that the Chrome DevTools Protocol makes this pretty easy. Brad hacked up
some Go code to drive Chrome (using https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp) and do
a basic download and then Mathieu Lonjaret made this tool, fleshing out the
idea.
[they removed it](http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html),
replacing it with a new API that doesn't let you download your
original photos. They instead let you download your photos
[with mangled EXIF, stripping location](https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/access-media-items#image-base-urls)
(and maybe recompressing the image bytes?).
There also used to be a way to sync your Google Photos to Google
Drive, and then you could use the Google Drive API to download your
original photos, but Google Photos
[removed that too](https://www.blog.google/products/photos/simplifying-google-photos-and-google-drive/).
We can get our original photos out with [Google Takeout](https://takeout.google.com/),
but only manually, and slowly. We don't want to have to remember to do
it (or remember to renew the time-limited scheduled takeouts) and we'd
like our photos mirrored in seconds or minutes, not weeks.
In [our original Perkeep
issue](https://github.com/perkeep/perkeep/issues/1144#issuecomment-525007239),
[@bradfitz](https://github.com/bradfitz/) said that we might have to give up on APIs and resort
to scraping, noting that the
[Chrome DevTools Protocol](https://github.com/ChromeDevTools/devtools-protocol) makes this
pretty easy. Brad hacked up some Go code to drive Chrome (using
https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp) and do a basic download and then
[Mathieu Lonjaret](https://github.com/mpl) made this tool, fleshing out the idea.
What if Google Photos breaks this tool on purpose or accident?
--------

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