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I have a large number of photo albums on Google Plus. I am looking for an efficient way to download them. Had I put them on Google Drive, I could have used skicka, which has a few annoyances but overall works very well.

I'm looking for a similar command-line style interface that will allow me to download an album at a time in a more scriptable way than just going through and clicking all the links in Google Plus.

Does anyone know if a tool like this exists? If I could make my Google Plus photos appear in Google Drive this wouldn't be a problem, but unfortunately that doesn't appear to be possible.

user1978019
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  • https://developers.google.com/+/api/ – leo Mar 13 '15 at 15:29
  • [Picasa Web APIs](https://developers.google.com/picasa-web/) is the APIs to access Google+ photos, if you just want to download all of your photos [Takeout](https://www.google.com/settings/takeout) would be your best option. – abraham Mar 13 '15 at 19:10

2 Answers2

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You can change a setting in Goggle Drive and still use skicka (as you suggested initially) to access the photos then.

How Google Drive works with Google Photos covers two interesting aspects:

  1. View your Google Drive photos & videos in Google Photos
  2. ...
  3. Organize your photos & videos into Google Drive folders

The 3rd section provides clear hints about how to make Google Photos appear inside My Drive as a folder. (The 2nd section is also supposed to describe this, but it's not useful for the automation we are looking for.)

Namely:

  1. Go to .

  2. Turn on the setting that creates a Google Photos folder in your "My Drive" folder (if you already turned this setting on, you can skip this step).

    • On the right, click the "gear" icon > Settings.
    • Next to "Automatically put your Google Photos into a folder in My Drive," check the box and then Done.

After this there is indeed such a folder in My Drive, and it accessible through skicka as well:

$ skicka ls /'Google Photos'/

shows all the photos. (And they must be downloadable, of course.)

(BTW, that's your question where I learned about skicka from, thanks a lot! Now I'm using it to upload directories with folders into Google Drive and Google Photos. It's a pity that the problem of creating albums with a tool or via Google Drive remains unsolved.)

Community
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imz -- Ivan Zakharyaschev
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  • this technique does not seem to work. I am able to turn on the Google Photos folder in Google Drive, but the photos I drop in would never appear in the Google Photos app. – gre Mar 08 '16 at 12:24
  • downloading the images from drive works for me. May be it doesn't work in other direction (from drive to photos). Google Photos Backup tool for Mac(https://photos.google.com/apps) does a good job in bulk uploading local photos. – Praveen R May 20 '16 at 11:16
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Use Google Takeout to download them all at once. Just pick Google Photos and uncheck anything else that's there. I don't know of any other way to batch download them all.

SS113
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  • I have more photos than I can download and unzip on my hard drive at once, so I was hoping there was an easier way than one giant download. – user1978019 Mar 15 '15 at 16:49
  • @user1978019 From the Takeout FAQ it says: _Zip files have a size limit of 2GB, so archives that are larger than 2GB are split into multiple .zip files. Selecting the .tgz or .tbz format for your archive will increase the size limit to 50GB_ so it won't be one giant zip. – SS113 Mar 16 '15 at 15:43