8 ms·

Google Photos API

182 points by ldcdc 8y ago

Use the Google Photos API to build smarter photo and video features for your product. Developer site: https://developers.google.com/photos https://developers.google.com/photos With the API you can help users transfer, share and bring their content into your app more easily (including features like auto-organized categories and creating link-shareable albums). API is now launched to General Availability, with official client libraries and sample apps for Java & PHP (and more in the works!). Large app integrations are also encouraged to join the Google Photos Partner Program. Check the developer site for more info.

photos_victim 8y ago
Wow, fantastic! This will allow me to drag Google’s sync app for Mac directly into the trash, which I’ve been dying to do for years! Then I can write some kind of program that finds the duplicated medium, small, and thumbnail sizes of all my photos, and the cropped faces, that Google senselessly uploaded from my Aperture/Photos library to the tune of 4 million+ garbage files. This API could make it possible for me to actually get value from Google Photos again.
- sketchthat 8y ago
  Please build this. Google's Sync app is terrible. I don't understand their logic - if you have a high res photo on Google Photos, but the original on your PC (Which will be higher quality) it won't overwrite it. You need to delete the cloud version and upload the original. It's stupid - I had a free Photo account with "high res" photo syncing for free, then I moved to a paid account and I have to delete all my photos and re-sync - which doesn't work on Mac, so now I only have 1/2 my photos backed up... So annoying.
  - photos_victim 8y ago
    Yeah, sharp edges everywhere. My favorite feature is if it can’t convert your raw images to JPEG, instead of skipping them it stores them in Drive as non-photo data, which can fill up your quota and cause your Gmail account to stop receiving mail. It’s probably the worst software that Google has put their brand on.
  - neves 8y ago
    You are lucky. I had some corrupted and very big photos in my filesystem. Since Google sync couldn't convert it, the software decided to upload the corrupted file to Google Drive as is. Sure I've checked to sync just photos in high res. Result: the corrupted uploaded files filled my Google Drive, so I couldn't receive emails anymore in Gmail! Lost 7 days of messages till diagnosed the problem.
  - mceachen 8y ago
    Hi there! I haven't launched yet, but you're throwing me a softball here. I am building it: https://PhotoStructure.com https://PhotoStructure.com Cleaning up the mess left from early-adopting N photo apps and websites that subsequently shut down is why I took on this project. I've got 20-odd hard drives that have accumulated over the years, filled with backups and libraries from Apple Photos, Aperture, Picasa, several hundred gigs of Google Takeout tarballs, and other ancient DAM apps. I wanted a single, organized, deduped, copy of my photos and videos. Skip the thumbnails, the files that are missing original EXIF headers, or have suffered bitrot. Finally, I've got a single folder hierarchy I can rsync to my NAS or wherever, and know I got everything. There's a simple SQLite db I use for persistence, and a web server that sits on top of it that makes browsing and searching your whole library feel serendipitous. So yeah, it's Google Photos that lives on your bookshelf. Viva the distributed web! I'm looking into the applicability of dat and ipfs for secure sharing soon. I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. The beta is free.
    - Flenser 8y ago
      > I've got 20-odd hard drives that have accumulated over the years, filled with backups and libraries from Apple Photos, Aperture, Picasa, several hundred gigs of Google Takeout tarballs, and other ancient DAM apps. I'm in a similar boat. What I'd like to know is: where are the duplicates and what can I safely delete? Anything that can help me clear it up would be a godsend!
      - mceachen 8y ago
        This was the approach I originally was considering (to do in-place duplicate deletion), but eventually gave up due to the impact of "undiscovered features" in my code. The approach I've settled on which should work for most people is to establish a new library, with unique copies of each of your originals, skipping exact SHA matches and invalid files. In your case, though, you'd run PhotoStructure in its "don't copy into the library" mode. Once it finishes scanning your drives, you can run a simple SQL query against your SQLite db to get a list of duplicate files. That query will be in the FAQ.
- Polarity 8y ago
  go to google drive and delete the wrongly uploaded directories. all changes will be propagated to photos.
  - photos_victim 8y ago
    Tried that, Backup-N-Sync just puts them up again.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
scottydelta 8y ago
Won't this enable hackers to make apps to steal people's images/photos given that many users don't think twice before authorizing apps to collect all the data they want just like we saw recently in case of top trending apps stealing data on Apple Store?
Jerry2 8y ago
>Show HN Is Google so desperate these days that they have to abuse about the only way a small developer can get some exposure on HN these days? And it garnered 25 upvotes, from mostly other Google employees I presume.
acgh213 8y ago
With some work this could replace the desktop app Google bought and discontinued (Picasa) and remove the dependency on Drive Sync
judge2020 8y ago
Looking through the documentation, this can be concerning: > Photo storage and quality > All media items uploaded to Google Photos using the API are stored in full resolution at original quality. They count toward the user’s storage. It would be nice to specify a photo to be stored as "high resolution" like you may as a gphotos user. Every photo uploaded via the API counting towards a user's storage might deter them from using the integration.
- steve19 8y ago
  I guess you could just do the same type of resizing they do before uploading although I agree it should be built into thr API.
  - judge2020 8y ago
    Maybe I misinterpreted this line, but it seems like even a resized photo will count against the storage quota.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    If a resized photo is stored in "original quality" mode, that's still counting as quota. "Lossy quality" mode photos straight up don't count.
highace 8y ago
Use the Google Photos API to build smarter photo and video features for your product... until we deprecate the API in a couple years time and leave you up shit creek.
- ariwilson 8y ago
  This is a tired meme given that the number of Google services closed has been mostly going down since 2013. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon... 2006 3 2007 4 2008 5 2009 7 2010 4 2011 16 2012 19 2013 11 2014 7 2015 6 2016 11 (actually 8 if you don't count things that got merged into other things) 2017 4 2018 2
  - jc4p 8y ago
    This wikipedia list is missing a lot of APIs, it seems more related to products -- For example, the QPX API (which I used) was shut down this April and is nowhere in that list. Your numbers are lower than they should be.
    - joshuamorton 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure the qpx API was a purchase, not something Google started. So it's arguable that you can categorize it the same way.
      - dingle_thunk 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure shutting down critical parts of acquired products is a major part of the problem.
        shshhdhs 8y ago
        agreed. Just because they were acquired doesn’t mean that the acquisition customers didn’t feel the pain from being forced deprecated
est 8y ago
https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/api-limits-quotas#photo-storage-quality https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/api-limi... > All media items uploaded to Google Photos using the API are stored in full resolution at original quality. They count toward the user’s storage. Are there some commercial decision behind this? Currently the Google uploader is worse than the previous backup tool, and you can't make third party uploader with this API.
- ldcdc 8y ago
  Thanks for the question. This is something the team is actively considering in: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/111193036 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/111193036 Our primary concern is ensuring that users have full control over the quality of media that's added to their library (so currently the API defaults to always uploading in original quality). Clearly there are ways that problem can be solved, so please suggest this use case in the issuetracker and star the issue (so we have a sense of developer interest & you can be kept in the loop on updates).
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    If we can resize the pictures ourselves and be sure they don't count against our quota that would solve my problem. As it stands it seems people are interpreting it as if all images, regardless of size, will count against the quota. If this is just a documentation issue I'd be happy to see it fixed. Anyways, as mentioned upthread it would be great to have an option in the api or something.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Please also tak a look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17956695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17956695 As I read it now it limits the usage so broadly and vaguely that I'd be hesitant to put any serious effort into it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
bitmapbrother 8y ago
Great move. Now create an API for Google Play Music so that anyone can write a front end for it.
- jasonvorhe 8y ago
  Too late: We're supposed to jump over to YouTube Music, which is a mediocre attempt of being more like Spotify. It's been months and my Play Music library still isn't accessible from YTM. Artists in my library are still a mix of YouTube followings and music artists I care about. I have to long press on an album to add it to my library which is cumbersome. The recommendations are useless in comparison to GPM. YTM doesn't surface artists playing in my area which was an awesome feature that GPM still has. I really hope they decide to go Google Pay route: See how stupid is was to change the branding of something from Google to $otherproduct, then see a decline in users, go back to the Google brand and just overhaul the existing apps and infrastructure. Google is a really weird company sometimes and I'd love to be the fly on the wall during meetings where they decided upon shit like YTM.
abhisuri97 8y ago
Their acceptable use policy seems to be fishy > Innovate, don't duplicate > Don’t make a substitute for Google Photos or use this API to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) a similar or competing product or service. For instance, if your app’s primary aim is to provide a general purpose photo gallery app, it’s a substitute for Google Photos.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Ouch. I didn't catch that. IANAL, but this seems to rule out the use of this API in a number of places where it would be useful (plugin for open source photo management seems to be directly targeted etc). I can understand why they don't want to allow me to train my image recognition software using their API, but this phrasing makes me really wonder what it is for except syncing.
  - ldcdc 8y ago
    Thanks, that's helpful feedback. If you have a specific use case in mind, please drop us a note through the partner program and our team can provide you with specific guidance: https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/ https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      Not a partner so not sure my feedback is relevant there, but an obvious use case would be integration, probably as a plugin into all kind of open source galleries, photo browsers, organizers etc. Also, generally the wording is vague enough to cover almost anything, which means at some point, sooner or later you might have to rely on the judgement of some random future googler to prevent all your integrations being destroyed.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- superioritycplx 8y ago
  > Don't be evil. Leave that to us.
andrewstuart 8y ago
There's alot of comments here about Google shutting down its services. Here's what Amazon does with products it no longer wants: Consider SimpleDB, one of the first of the Amazon web services and effectively dead. But still has a live page, and still works and is online https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ But is not listed in the Amazon Web Services product lineup: https://aws.amazon.com/products/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/ Presumably if you had built something on it many years ago (which I did), it would still be working today. Maybe the lesson for Google is that instead of killing things, leave them working but without future development. And instead of radical pricing change, make pricing change for new customers and leave the old ones on the existing pricing. Sure people might be unhappy about the changes but they are less likely to be enraged and lose trust in Google. This post from Amazon Web Services CTO https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/03/10-lessons-from-10-years-of-aws.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/03/10-lessons-from... says: 5. APIs are forever This was a lesson we had already learned from our experiences with Amazon retail, but it became even more important for AWS’s API-centric business. Once customers started building their applications and systems using our APIs, changing those APIs becomes impossible, as we would be impacting our customer’s business operations if we would do so. We knew that designing APIs was a very important task as we’d only have one chance to get it right.
- gcb0 8y ago
  yahoo shut down pipes only after it was pretty much abandoned
- nikolay 8y ago
  SimpleDB still works though.
- zaarn 8y ago
  >5. APIs are forever Microsoft does a lot of work in that direction too, there are workarounds and fallbacks to older API behavior everywhere around the place. I think this is also compatible with Linus' mantra; "Don't break userspace". (Obviously there is a limit, Linus did elaborate on those limits recently). I really don't like it when APIs stop working. There are plenty of ways to get people off the old API without disrupting them or annoying anyone, as you mention, an option is to simply stop advertising the old version and maybe make it more expensive (or less accessible) to new customers. Having a stable API that I can bet a product for 10 years (or more) on is something that developers (and users) like and should be a huge plus when deciding between product offerings from companies.
mamcx 8y ago
What about timing. I need a API for sync photos for my mobile app. Now what to use?
vojta_letal 8y ago
I want to be able to sync tagged faces from photos to contacts. Or at least access the tagged face via the API. My photos, my contacts. What's the big deal?
jwong_ 8y ago
I hope we get something besides Backup and Sync as a replacement for Google Photos Uploader. My workflow broke when Backup and Sync doesn't work the same way, and not as consistent. I can't only upload photos, and it seems to try to vacuum up other files, so I've just told it to stop since they broke the Googel Photos Uploader API.
owaislone 8y ago
Slightly unrelated: Google Photos is a great product but for me it has one huge drawback. You cannot remove a person from a shared album after adding them. You or anyone an album is shared with can accidentally share the album with any other person and once that happens, only way to stop them from accessing your photos is to delete the whole album. Deleting the album means losing all photos, comments and likes added by others. Also sharing an album always generates a link that can be used by anyone to access the album. I haven't found a way to share only with people without generating the link.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zbrozek 8y ago
Maybe I'll finally be able to de-dupe the low-resolution photos Picasa uploaded against the higher-resolution photos that photo importer tool uploaded. I'll just have to write the de-duping tool myself. Great!
scarcely 8y ago
Would it be possible to hack together a usable manual tagging system via the API? I don't mean the automatic face tagging, or built-in tagging functionality (I assume Google Photos doesn't have it). I mean would it be possible to use the API to insert keywords into the description fields and reliably search the description fields
anentropic 8y ago
someone tell Apple I have to do a tedious manual export and upload to get photos from Apple Photos desktop app to Google Photos cloud (and I don't want a sync app that uploads everything)
ayy_lmao 8y ago
>enjoying a soon to be deprecated API at the price of letting the G access to all your data I shiggy diggy
m-p-3 8y ago
Here is Google shutting down another API (which are forever until they're not), and still no sign of a Google Keep API. Come on Google, you can do better than this.
willcodeforfoo 8y ago
Finally! This looks great, there was a way to get access to Google Photos via the Drive API but a dedicated one is a nice surprise. However... I noticed a clause that requires a "Commercial license" if your app prints photos: > If your product transfers a user’s photos onto physical goods (such as photo prints or t-shirts) and you charge money for this service, you must have a Commercial license. For more information, see the Google Photos partner program. Anyone know how much this costs or why this is the case?
czue 8y ago
Ooh wow this looks like I can finally add a bunch of features to my "google photos in your new tabs" chrome extension (http://www.photosnewtab.com/ http://www.photosnewtab.com/)

Google Photos API

182 points by ldcdc 8y ago

photos_victim 8y ago

Wow, fantastic! This will allow me to drag Google’s sync app for Mac directly into the trash, which I’ve been dying to do for years! Then I can write some kind of program that finds the duplicated medium, small, and thumbnail sizes of all my photos, and the cropped faces, that Google senselessly uploaded from my Aperture/Photos library to the tune of 4 million+ garbage files. This API could make it possible for me to actually get value from Google Photos again.

sketchthat 8y ago
Please build this. Google's Sync app is terrible. I don't understand their logic - if you have a high res photo on Google Photos, but the original on your PC (Which will be higher quality) it won't overwrite it. You need to delete the cloud version and upload the original. It's stupid - I had a free Photo account with "high res" photo syncing for free, then I moved to a paid account and I have to delete all my photos and re-sync - which doesn't work on Mac, so now I only have 1/2 my photos backed up... So annoying.
- photos_victim 8y ago
  Yeah, sharp edges everywhere. My favorite feature is if it can’t convert your raw images to JPEG, instead of skipping them it stores them in Drive as non-photo data, which can fill up your quota and cause your Gmail account to stop receiving mail. It’s probably the worst software that Google has put their brand on.
- neves 8y ago
  You are lucky. I had some corrupted and very big photos in my filesystem. Since Google sync couldn't convert it, the software decided to upload the corrupted file to Google Drive as is. Sure I've checked to sync just photos in high res. Result: the corrupted uploaded files filled my Google Drive, so I couldn't receive emails anymore in Gmail! Lost 7 days of messages till diagnosed the problem.
- mceachen 8y ago
  Hi there! I haven't launched yet, but you're throwing me a softball here. I am building it: https://PhotoStructure.com https://PhotoStructure.com Cleaning up the mess left from early-adopting N photo apps and websites that subsequently shut down is why I took on this project. I've got 20-odd hard drives that have accumulated over the years, filled with backups and libraries from Apple Photos, Aperture, Picasa, several hundred gigs of Google Takeout tarballs, and other ancient DAM apps. I wanted a single, organized, deduped, copy of my photos and videos. Skip the thumbnails, the files that are missing original EXIF headers, or have suffered bitrot. Finally, I've got a single folder hierarchy I can rsync to my NAS or wherever, and know I got everything. There's a simple SQLite db I use for persistence, and a web server that sits on top of it that makes browsing and searching your whole library feel serendipitous. So yeah, it's Google Photos that lives on your bookshelf. Viva the distributed web! I'm looking into the applicability of dat and ipfs for secure sharing soon. I've got a limited number of beta users trying it out right now. If you're willing to share your feedback, please consider signing up. The beta is free.
  - Flenser 8y ago
    > I've got 20-odd hard drives that have accumulated over the years, filled with backups and libraries from Apple Photos, Aperture, Picasa, several hundred gigs of Google Takeout tarballs, and other ancient DAM apps. I'm in a similar boat. What I'd like to know is: where are the duplicates and what can I safely delete? Anything that can help me clear it up would be a godsend!
    - mceachen 8y ago
      This was the approach I originally was considering (to do in-place duplicate deletion), but eventually gave up due to the impact of "undiscovered features" in my code. The approach I've settled on which should work for most people is to establish a new library, with unique copies of each of your originals, skipping exact SHA matches and invalid files. In your case, though, you'd run PhotoStructure in its "don't copy into the library" mode. Once it finishes scanning your drives, you can run a simple SQL query against your SQLite db to get a list of duplicate files. That query will be in the FAQ.
Polarity 8y ago
go to google drive and delete the wrongly uploaded directories. all changes will be propagated to photos.
- photos_victim 8y ago
  Tried that, Backup-N-Sync just puts them up again.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

scottydelta 8y ago

Won't this enable hackers to make apps to steal people's images/photos given that many users don't think twice before authorizing apps to collect all the data they want just like we saw recently in case of top trending apps stealing data on Apple Store?

Jerry2 8y ago

>Show HN Is Google so desperate these days that they have to abuse about the only way a small developer can get some exposure on HN these days? And it garnered 25 upvotes, from mostly other Google employees I presume.

acgh213 8y ago

With some work this could replace the desktop app Google bought and discontinued (Picasa) and remove the dependency on Drive Sync

judge2020 8y ago

Looking through the documentation, this can be concerning: > Photo storage and quality > All media items uploaded to Google Photos using the API are stored in full resolution at original quality. They count toward the user’s storage. It would be nice to specify a photo to be stored as "high resolution" like you may as a gphotos user. Every photo uploaded via the API counting towards a user's storage might deter them from using the integration.

steve19 8y ago
I guess you could just do the same type of resizing they do before uploading although I agree it should be built into thr API.
- judge2020 8y ago
  Maybe I misinterpreted this line, but it seems like even a resized photo will count against the storage quota.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  If a resized photo is stored in "original quality" mode, that's still counting as quota. "Lossy quality" mode photos straight up don't count.

highace 8y ago

Use the Google Photos API to build smarter photo and video features for your product... until we deprecate the API in a couple years time and leave you up shit creek.

ariwilson 8y ago
This is a tired meme given that the number of Google services closed has been mostly going down since 2013. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon... 2006 3 2007 4 2008 5 2009 7 2010 4 2011 16 2012 19 2013 11 2014 7 2015 6 2016 11 (actually 8 if you don't count things that got merged into other things) 2017 4 2018 2
- jc4p 8y ago
  This wikipedia list is missing a lot of APIs, it seems more related to products -- For example, the QPX API (which I used) was shut down this April and is nowhere in that list. Your numbers are lower than they should be.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure the qpx API was a purchase, not something Google started. So it's arguable that you can categorize it the same way.
    - dingle_thunk 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure shutting down critical parts of acquired products is a major part of the problem.
      - shshhdhs 8y ago
        agreed. Just because they were acquired doesn’t mean that the acquisition customers didn’t feel the pain from being forced deprecated

est 8y ago

https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/api-limits-quotas#photo-storage-quality https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/api-limi... > All media items uploaded to Google Photos using the API are stored in full resolution at original quality. They count toward the user’s storage. Are there some commercial decision behind this? Currently the Google uploader is worse than the previous backup tool, and you can't make third party uploader with this API.

ldcdc 8y ago
Thanks for the question. This is something the team is actively considering in: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/111193036 https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/111193036 Our primary concern is ensuring that users have full control over the quality of media that's added to their library (so currently the API defaults to always uploading in original quality). Clearly there are ways that problem can be solved, so please suggest this use case in the issuetracker and star the issue (so we have a sense of developer interest & you can be kept in the loop on updates).
- reitanqild 8y ago
  If we can resize the pictures ourselves and be sure they don't count against our quota that would solve my problem. As it stands it seems people are interpreting it as if all images, regardless of size, will count against the quota. If this is just a documentation issue I'd be happy to see it fixed. Anyways, as mentioned upthread it would be great to have an option in the api or something.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Please also tak a look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17956695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17956695 As I read it now it limits the usage so broadly and vaguely that I'd be hesitant to put any serious effort into it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

bitmapbrother 8y ago

Great move. Now create an API for Google Play Music so that anyone can write a front end for it.

jasonvorhe 8y ago
Too late: We're supposed to jump over to YouTube Music, which is a mediocre attempt of being more like Spotify. It's been months and my Play Music library still isn't accessible from YTM. Artists in my library are still a mix of YouTube followings and music artists I care about. I have to long press on an album to add it to my library which is cumbersome. The recommendations are useless in comparison to GPM. YTM doesn't surface artists playing in my area which was an awesome feature that GPM still has. I really hope they decide to go Google Pay route: See how stupid is was to change the branding of something from Google to $otherproduct, then see a decline in users, go back to the Google brand and just overhaul the existing apps and infrastructure. Google is a really weird company sometimes and I'd love to be the fly on the wall during meetings where they decided upon shit like YTM.

abhisuri97 8y ago

Their acceptable use policy seems to be fishy > Innovate, don't duplicate > Don’t make a substitute for Google Photos or use this API to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) a similar or competing product or service. For instance, if your app’s primary aim is to provide a general purpose photo gallery app, it’s a substitute for Google Photos.

reitanqild 8y ago
Ouch. I didn't catch that. IANAL, but this seems to rule out the use of this API in a number of places where it would be useful (plugin for open source photo management seems to be directly targeted etc). I can understand why they don't want to allow me to train my image recognition software using their API, but this phrasing makes me really wonder what it is for except syncing.
- ldcdc 8y ago
  Thanks, that's helpful feedback. If you have a specific use case in mind, please drop us a note through the partner program and our team can provide you with specific guidance: https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/ https://developers.google.com/photos/partner-program/
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Not a partner so not sure my feedback is relevant there, but an obvious use case would be integration, probably as a plugin into all kind of open source galleries, photo browsers, organizers etc. Also, generally the wording is vague enough to cover almost anything, which means at some point, sooner or later you might have to rely on the judgement of some random future googler to prevent all your integrations being destroyed.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
superioritycplx 8y ago
> Don't be evil. Leave that to us.

andrewstuart 8y ago

There's alot of comments here about Google shutting down its services. Here's what Amazon does with products it no longer wants: Consider SimpleDB, one of the first of the Amazon web services and effectively dead. But still has a live page, and still works and is online https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ https://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/ But is not listed in the Amazon Web Services product lineup: https://aws.amazon.com/products/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/ Presumably if you had built something on it many years ago (which I did), it would still be working today. Maybe the lesson for Google is that instead of killing things, leave them working but without future development. And instead of radical pricing change, make pricing change for new customers and leave the old ones on the existing pricing. Sure people might be unhappy about the changes but they are less likely to be enraged and lose trust in Google. This post from Amazon Web Services CTO https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/03/10-lessons-from-10-years-of-aws.html https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2016/03/10-lessons-from... says: 5. APIs are forever This was a lesson we had already learned from our experiences with Amazon retail, but it became even more important for AWS’s API-centric business. Once customers started building their applications and systems using our APIs, changing those APIs becomes impossible, as we would be impacting our customer’s business operations if we would do so. We knew that designing APIs was a very important task as we’d only have one chance to get it right.

gcb0 8y ago
yahoo shut down pipes only after it was pretty much abandoned
nikolay 8y ago
SimpleDB still works though.
zaarn 8y ago
>5. APIs are forever Microsoft does a lot of work in that direction too, there are workarounds and fallbacks to older API behavior everywhere around the place. I think this is also compatible with Linus' mantra; "Don't break userspace". (Obviously there is a limit, Linus did elaborate on those limits recently). I really don't like it when APIs stop working. There are plenty of ways to get people off the old API without disrupting them or annoying anyone, as you mention, an option is to simply stop advertising the old version and maybe make it more expensive (or less accessible) to new customers. Having a stable API that I can bet a product for 10 years (or more) on is something that developers (and users) like and should be a huge plus when deciding between product offerings from companies.

mamcx 8y ago

What about timing. I need a API for sync photos for my mobile app. Now what to use?

vojta_letal 8y ago

I want to be able to sync tagged faces from photos to contacts. Or at least access the tagged face via the API. My photos, my contacts. What's the big deal?

jwong_ 8y ago

I hope we get something besides Backup and Sync as a replacement for Google Photos Uploader. My workflow broke when Backup and Sync doesn't work the same way, and not as consistent. I can't only upload photos, and it seems to try to vacuum up other files, so I've just told it to stop since they broke the Googel Photos Uploader API.

owaislone 8y ago

Slightly unrelated: Google Photos is a great product but for me it has one huge drawback. You cannot remove a person from a shared album after adding them. You or anyone an album is shared with can accidentally share the album with any other person and once that happens, only way to stop them from accessing your photos is to delete the whole album. Deleting the album means losing all photos, comments and likes added by others. Also sharing an album always generates a link that can be used by anyone to access the album. I haven't found a way to share only with people without generating the link.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

zbrozek 8y ago

Maybe I'll finally be able to de-dupe the low-resolution photos Picasa uploaded against the higher-resolution photos that photo importer tool uploaded. I'll just have to write the de-duping tool myself. Great!

scarcely 8y ago

Would it be possible to hack together a usable manual tagging system via the API? I don't mean the automatic face tagging, or built-in tagging functionality (I assume Google Photos doesn't have it). I mean would it be possible to use the API to insert keywords into the description fields and reliably search the description fields

anentropic 8y ago

someone tell Apple I have to do a tedious manual export and upload to get photos from Apple Photos desktop app to Google Photos cloud (and I don't want a sync app that uploads everything)

ayy_lmao 8y ago

>enjoying a soon to be deprecated API at the price of letting the G access to all your data I shiggy diggy

m-p-3 8y ago

Here is Google shutting down another API (which are forever until they're not), and still no sign of a Google Keep API. Come on Google, you can do better than this.

willcodeforfoo 8y ago

Finally! This looks great, there was a way to get access to Google Photos via the Drive API but a dedicated one is a nice surprise. However... I noticed a clause that requires a "Commercial license" if your app prints photos: > If your product transfers a user’s photos onto physical goods (such as photo prints or t-shirts) and you charge money for this service, you must have a Commercial license. For more information, see the Google Photos partner program. Anyone know how much this costs or why this is the case?

czue 8y ago

Ooh wow this looks like I can finally add a bunch of features to my "google photos in your new tabs" chrome extension (http://www.photosnewtab.com/ http://www.photosnewtab.com/)