gphotos-cli: A command line interface for Google Photos

A command line interface app for Google photos for doing bulk tasks such as mass filtered downloads and mass uploads.

Features

• Parallelized uploading and downloading
• Filtering by date and category type for downloads
• Album creation
• Uploads and downloads to/from albums (can only upload to albums created by this app due to Google's API limitations)
• Exponential backoff for large uploads and downloads, tested on jobs 100 GB+ large
• Handles all raw video and image types supported by Google photos

Installation

With Go already installed and setup, just call:

go get -u github.com/trinhdrew1418/gphotos-cli

Before usage, you first need to grant the application account authorization:

gphotos-cli init

Commands

init

This initializes the authorization token needed to access your account

gphotos-cli init

options

• -c or --credential-path Designate the path of the credenntial file you'd alternatively like to use.

push

Command to upload files to your google photos library.

gphotos-cli push [-OPTIONS] [FILE 1] [FOLDER 1] ...

options

• -r or --recursive Recursively traverses folders in arguments for file uploads

• -s or --select Pulls up a menu to select available albums from to upload to. NOTE: you can ONLY upload to albums that you've created through this app. This is a limitation of the google photos api.

• -v or --verbose This lists out all of the files you'll be uploading. Useful if you want to know which files have valid extensions.

• -a or --album Input the name of the album you want to upload to

pull

Command to download files

gphotos-cli pull [-OPTIONS]

Follow the prompts to select your filters. It will download your files into folders separated by year and month. Each file will be named with its day of creation and time.

You can filter up to 10 of the following categories:

• animals
• landmarks
• pets
• utility
• birthdays
• landscapes
• receipts
• weddings
• cityscapes
• night
• screenshots
• whiteboards
• arts
• crafts
• fashion
• documents
• people
• selfies
• houses
• gardens
• flowers
• holidays
• travel
• food
• performances
• sport

options

• -d [PATH] define the directory path you want to download your files to.

• -s or --select pull up a selection menu of albums to download instead. The files will be downloading into a folder of the name of the album. The files will not be organized further beyond this. As a limitation of the API, filtering in conjunction with an album request is not possible.

• -a or --album Input the name of the album you want to download from.

albums

Create albums by calling

gphotos-cli albums create [TITLE OF ALBUM]

More subcommands coming later.

Caveats

• You may unexpectedly hit a quota limit due to the application coming with some default credentials.
• Due to a google photos api limitation, you can only upload to albums created by the app
• When downloading files, its undetermined how many photos in total you`ll be downloading. The API uses pagination for large requests and instead of waiting for possibly several page requests for the full download request, it is faster to concurrently do requests for pages whilst downloading what's available. The current default page size is 25.
• The API does not support the retrieval of raw files. If you try to pull a raw file, it will return a compressed jpeg. Downloading raw files still works through the website though.

Credits

Some of these packages were a huge help; either directly, as reference code, or as inspiration.

• cobra
• gphotos-uploader-cli
• mpb
• promptui
• drive

TODOs

• Mass moving existing photos to albums
• Search by metadata: specific filetypes, camera types, etc.
• Resumable uploads and data chunking for large file uploads
• Upload and download speed metrics