How can I download and sync my google photos to Linux?

Question

I have alot of photos on my google account, it's painless too upload pictures there but what do I do if I want to download and sync them to my Linux system?

Answer 1

I use gphotos-sync and it's painless after setup.

Mind that gphotos-sync only downloads your photos, it cannot upload!!

You need to configure google-photos sharing in the google-cloud before use:

Use these guides:

https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Local_incremental_Google_Photos_backup_on_Ubuntu.html

or.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ck1679H8ifmZ_4eVbDeD_-jezIcZ-j6MlaNaeQiz7y0/edit

When your ready go too:

https://console.cloud.google.com/

Create a new project. Name and location don't matter.

Go to console.cloud.google.com/projectselector2/apis/library, select your new project, then select the Photos Library API. Click the big blue Enable button.

Go to console.cloud.google.com/apis, select your project and go to OAuth Consent Screen. Select External.

Fill in a name and click Save.

In the menu bar, go to Credentials, Create Credentials, OAuth ClientID.

Select type Desktop Application and give the client a name. I used gp_client.

You'll see a confirmation screen. Afterwards, use the download arrow button to save the file as client_secret.json:

I saved it in my ~/Downloads folder and then moved it to the correct folder for gphotos-sync, creating it if it does not exist:

the client_secret.json file has to be named as here.

mkdir -p ~/.config/gphotos-sync/
cp ~/Downloads/client_secret.json ~/.config/gphotos-sync/client_secret.json

Once you login to Google you might get an 'Unverified' warning, which, in this case, is fine.

After this, rather complex process, it's time to install and then you can start using the software.

python -m pip install --user gphotos-sync
gphotos-sync YOUR-DIRECTORY

If you get an error when trying to sync then use this:

gphotos-sync --new-token YOUR-DIRECTORY

Here you have it on github:

https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/

https://github.com/somethingSomething78/gphotos-sync