How to access a Google Photos shared album

Question

I posted this as an answer to a related question but it was deleted by a moderator, so I'm posting this now as a question. The related question is

Accessing shared albums from Google Photos

I am trying to access a Google Photos shared album using JavaScript. Public albums created with Picasa are easier to deal with using the Picasa Web Albums Data API.

I've developed a peculiar solution parsing the HTML contents of a shared album URL, such as

https://photos.google.com/share/<album>?key=<key>

The parsing function is

function getgooglephotos2(result)
{
    var r2 = result.substr(result.search("AF_initDataCallback\\("));
    var r3 = r2.substr(0, r2.search("https://video"));
    var img = r3.search("https:");
    while (img != -1) {
        var r4 = r3.substr(img);
        var imgend = r4.search("\"");
        var r5 = r4.substr(0, imgend);
        // r5 contains an image url
        r3 = r4.substr(imgend);
        img = r3.search("https:");
    }
}

I would prefer a cleaner approach. Any idea?

Thanks.

PS: it seems that using authentication, I can reach a Google Photos shared album, but I am trying to implement a solution that doesn't require authentication for shared (public) albums. Here's a link

https://adodson.com/hello.js/demos/albums.html

A simpler approach to test this is

Authenticate on picasa and fetch your userid

https://picasaweb.google.com

After authentication you will reach

https://get.google.com/albumarchive/<userid>?source=pwa

Get your album list using the Picasa Web Albums Data API

https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/<userid>

Did you eventually find another solution? I'm trying to implement shared album content retrieval for a photo slideshow app for my grandma, and I was amazed to see there's no supported API to do that :( — Timothée Groleau, Feb 19 '17 at 06:04

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 18 '19 at 18:49

I'm just developing app that doesn't require authentication. Anyway somehow you need to point out which album should be displaying. In my project I'm using Firebase to store URLs to shared albums. Then I request the URL and get photos using regex. To retrieve the photos I used this tutorial:

https://medium.com/@ValentinHervieu/how-i-used-google-photos-to-host-my-website-pictures-gallery-d49f037c8e3c

At the moment there is no way to access shared albums directly from Google Photos without authentication.

How to access a Google Photos shared album

1 Answers1