Google photos download specific album automatically

Rescans

I have just experienced an issue with duplication of files when doing a rescan (–rescan or –flush-index). It looks like some items have changed in the library and this can result in the same file downloading twice. I would guess this has something to do with Google removing the Drive link to Photos.

UPDATE: I now know that this was caused by subtle changes in the metadata. It seems Google does not guarantee to deliver exactly the same files each time you scan the library (but to be fair, I think they are tuning things for the better).

The problem did cause some duplicate named files to be downloaded twice overwriting their duplicate peer. Note that no files were lost from the library (since gphotos is read-only) and it was possible to repair things by either:

• using the local comparison feature of gphotos-sync against a prior backup
• or downloading the library again from scratch

In summary, most people will not be affected by the issue I had unless they have very old photos with duplicate file names.

My detailed notes on the subject are here: giles notes

Google GPS Info update

UPDATE: the GPS scraping no longer works and has been removed. I am investigating a couple of other avenues.

Google does not seem to be interested in fxing the issue of stripping location info from the EXIF info of images downloaded via their API (see www.cronistalascolonias.com.ar#comment80). So I am investigating a workaround. See the option –get-locations. It uses Selenium to scrape the GPS info off of the Google Website (your google creds required I’m afraid) and insert them into the DB of synchronized files. It does not yet update the EXIF on the local files but this is a minor addition and I’ll implement if there is interest.

Have a try and let me know what you think. Hurry, because Google is removing the ability to log in using automation soon!