Google Photos Album Limit

It is something to consider for sure, but the reason I do not include such functionality specifically for Google is the nature of its API.

Basically, if you look at a platform such as Flickr or SmugMug, their API offers the ability to paginate results. You can specify a starting position and pull a certain number of photos from that point. This lets you pull separate pages in parallel. However, this has seldom been required for these platforms as they have a pretty high limit of photos returned (500, I think).

However, Google’s API works differently. To get the second page of results from Google, I need a token returned in the API call for the first page; to get the third page, I need the token from the second page etc. This means, there is no way to fetch all photos from an album in parallel, and calls have to happen in sequence.

There are a few problems with this:

1. Sequential calls take a lot of time, particularly for Google. I have seen this come up for the “query chaining” feature for fetching albums.
2. Google’s API limits are quite restrictive, and if you are using the plugin heavily, you will encounter this frequently. You will start encountering errors saying that you have exceeded your quota.
3. Google monitors usage patterns and is known to have dinged quite a few users with a violation of “Acceptable usage policy”. This tends to happen when they deem someone is using their Client ID to mimic Google Photos using a different platform.
4. With its announcement to retire the Google Photos API, I am not even sure if the replacement has some of these capabilities. More importantly, I am not even sure if I will be able to switch over users in time to the replacement.

I see, that makes sense. I think there are maybe some solutions such as caching in the DB and asynchronous calls, but this would require time and effort to implement and might not be worth it in the end. Would you be open to a contribution if I ever come up with something like that? Or maybe it could be a add-on plugin of sorts.

Also regarding the changes to the API, you reminded me, I wanted to ask you what exactly this means for the plugin. Just for clarification, is this the change that’s supposed to take effect on March 31, 2025? I got an email about a month ago about this and I wanted to ask you about it.

Also regarding the changes to the API, you reminded me, I wanted to ask you what exactly this means for the plugin. Just for clarification, is this the change that’s supposed to take effect on March 31, 2025? I got an email about a month ago about this and I wanted to ask you about it.

Yes, that’s the change. See here for my response.

At the end of the day, this plugin is simply a hobby that I have nurtured for almost 14 years, completely unrelated to my day job. When a change becomes too challenging, the wisest course of action is sometimes to gracefully exit. When Google made its last round of cataclysmic changes a few years back, almost all plugins supporting Google Photos disappeared overnight, but I was able to stay ahead of the game. This time, with the pressures of my day job, I just haven’t been able to look into this. I still have some time around the Christmas break when I will take some time then. I will know if I can deliver the change at that point of time.

I understand this plugin is a hobby, that’s why I mentioned it’s probably not worth solving the above using any elaborate solution. Especially given the fact that Google keeps changing the API. Thank you for your effort!