[HN Gopher] Google change is breaking some digital photo frames
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Google change is breaking some digital photo frames
Author : tomsonj
Score : 56 points
Date : 2025-03-04 15:19 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Aren't the photo frame companies able to issue firmware updates?
| Since the devices are internet-connected, it seems like they
| ought to be able to. According to the article, the new API
| "can... access... albums through the new Google Photos Picker
| API".
|
| Or maybe they don't even need firmware updates, if it's all
| managed via the photo frame's website.
|
| API's change, and if you make a product that uses an API, you
| need to be able to change with it.
|
| If Google is somehow making it technically impossible for the
| photo frames to auto-update from an album, then that would be
| really annoying. But it doesn't sound like that?
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _If Google is somehow making it technically impossible for
| the photo frames to auto-update from an album..._
|
| Per TFA, that's what's happening. _" Instead, apps can only
| access photos or albums through the new Google Photos Picker
| API, which requires users to manually 'pick' each photo."_
| semiquaver wrote:
| The picker API limits access to selected photos. It doesn't
| look like there is an API for "all current and future photos
| from an album", which is the problem (from integrators'
| perspective)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Does it? From Google's own docs, it seems tremendously
| unclear.
|
| But from the official page it says [1]:
|
| > _For example, if your asking your users to share a specific
| album, you could include the following text on the same page
| your users connect to Google Photos: "Connect to Google
| Photos, then search for the album you want to share."_
|
| This suggests that users _are_ able to share a specific album
| that shares all photos within, without having to individually
| select.
|
| It's hard to see why Google would take away the ability to
| share all photos in an album, when that's such a common use
| case.
|
| If they _have_ removed that, it 's incredibly dumb. I just
| don't see anything concrete that they have? I'd love to see
| proof one way or another. Does anyone have access to the
| picker interface itself? Does it allow you to select an album
| directly?
|
| [1] https://developers.google.com/photos/picker/guides/pickin
| g-e...
| nightpool wrote:
| No, if you look at the screenshots on that page it's clear
| that when they mention albums, they're only talking about
| the search experience, not the picking experience:
|
| https://developers.google.com/static/photos/images/picker-
| pi...
|
| They also clarify this in the documentation: "Albums,
| favorites, and other common photos categories are not show
| [sic] directly. Users can search for photos using various
| criteria, such as keywords, dates, locations, and album
| titles"
|
| The user can search for album names, but only the images
| from those albums are shown, and users can only select
| individual images. In the screenshots, you can also see
| that it shows that you can only select up to 2000 images.
| And you can see in the docs that only Image, Video and
| Motion type files are returned--there's no album reference
| that you can grab, and the URLs for these files expire
| after 60 minutes:
| https://developers.google.com/photos/picker/guides/media-
| ite...
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's still not 100% clear to me, but I definitely see
| what you're saying. I know there's no album reference,
| but it seems entirely possible that Image files returned
| are _all_ from a specific album, without having to choose
| them one-by-one. That seems entirely consistent with the
| API, the only question is the actual Picker interface.
|
| If Google really has removed the ability to share all
| photos from a picked album, that's so idiotic I just
| don't get it. I don't see what possible benefit there is
| to security or to Google here. Why would Google screw
| over users for no reason at all? Companies generally
| remove features for a strategic reason. They don't upset
| consumers just for the fun of it.
|
| Also, their blog post [1] clearly states, emphasis mine:
|
| "The Picker API offers a secure and intuitive way for
| users to search for _and select_ photos _and albums_
| through a seamless integration with the Google Photos
| app. "
|
| Does anyone have a link to the actual picker in action?
| And if it's missing selecting an album, is this
| intentional or an oversight that will be quickly
| corrected?
|
| [1] https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-photos-
| picker-ap...
| nightpool wrote:
| Did you see the section of the doc I quoted that said
| albums wouldn't be shown to the user? I think that makes
| it clear that it's by design
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yeah but it directly contradicts where they say you can
| select albums. That's why it's confusing and unclear.
| com2kid wrote:
| This new API is so bad that it is breaking Google photo albums
| on Android TVs!
|
| No one wants to manually add each photo to a slideshow. Google
| Photos has AI that automatically makes themed albums, it works
| great. I point my TV at my family photos, new pictures of my
| family are automatically added as I take them, and then shown
| on my TV. That is how it is supposed to work.
|
| This new locked down API places all the security burden on the
| user, and a large % of users are not going to be able to figure
| out the new system, and the new system is so complicated that
| many products are just going to give up on working altogether.
|
| The new system, even if well intentioned, should not be rolled
| out, it is a huge net loss for users.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Is it a huge net loss for Google though?
| com2kid wrote:
| I'm paying for their photo service. If their photo service
| gets dumbed down to become a simple file store, it makes it
| easier for me to migrate to a different photo storage
| service.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Good, more security and better controls means third-party apps
| cannot simply scrape all of my photos.
| philips wrote:
| It cuts both ways. It will probably make it ever harder for
| users to get a backup of their photos.
|
| I tried to build a product to help people get a physical backup
| out of Google Photos but their API had so many rate limits and
| random other errors it would take _days_ or more:
| https://www.clonecamel.com
|
| Now, I need to also look at how this will work with my personal
| backup system that uses rclone to an encrypted USB drive.
| nar001 wrote:
| Wouldn't using Google Takeout do that already? I thought that
| was the point, to take out your data?
| philips wrote:
| Have you ever used takeout? You get 33 1GB chunks in a link
| sent via _EMAIL_ that then I have to click on and
| authenticate in my browser. 33 clicks.
| abraham wrote:
| You can change to archive size to 50GB per file.
| philips wrote:
| Gah, thank you. The drop down is one of those terrible
| ones with no scroll bar and only three entries so I have
| to do the ol 'scroll wheel and hope' to discover more
| options.
| mandevil wrote:
| Only on TGZ files, not zip, which maxes out at 4GB. (This
| is not because of a file size limitation. The only way to
| get 4GB is through zip64, which has a file size limit
| measured in exabytes.)
| hurutparittya wrote:
| Just... get the TGZ then?
| mandevil wrote:
| For you and me, not a problem. My wife is a medical
| professional and would have no clue what to do with a TGZ
| file.
|
| Also, the fact that they don't mention this difference-
| the UI is so poorly done that you can only tell that TGZ
| can go an order of magnitude larger after selecting it in
| one drop-down and then looking at the other drop down- is
| a sign of how Google wants to make this as difficult as
| possible.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| You can pick the maximum size of zipballs. I think the
| max is 10GB? Or 50GB?
|
| It's annoying in that it can take up to a week for the
| first mail to reply. And you can't automate it, so no
| automatic backups.
| philips wrote:
| Yes, no automation and no incremental backups makes
| things so annoying.
| mandevil wrote:
| When I did this recently the max zip was 4GB- and that
| was only from doing zip64, regular old zip was 2GB limit.
| TGZ could do up to 50GB.
|
| But these limits are weird because while file size limits
| do exist, they don't match Google's limits: 4GB is the
| limit for regular zip, zip64 has a limit of 16 exabytes.
| And TGZ's limit of 50GB shows that they they have the
| internal infrastructure to support building larger files
| too.
|
| So, other than that most of their customers use Windows
| and they want to make takeout as annoying as possible, do
| they put that limit on it?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| You can have it automatically upload to dropbox or a few
| other hosting services which I don't remember. And then
| you can download it with one click.
| philips wrote:
| I tried dozens of times to get it to upload to OneDrive
| and it always failed.
| shanemhansen wrote:
| The nice thing about Google Takeout is that sometimes, if
| you retry often enough, it works.
|
| The frequent failures to generate my takeout are annoying
| though.
| prepend wrote:
| If I authorize an app to scrape an entire album, that's a good
| thing.
|
| This isn't more security, this is google attempting to squeeze
| more monetization.
| diddid wrote:
| Never trust google for anything important, because they will
| mess with it to get money or cancel it if they can't get the
| money, regardless of anything they've claimed in the past.
| renewiltord wrote:
| No, users must be protected for their own sake. You cannot be
| allowed to trade off convenience for privacy. It's too
| important. M
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Sure, but what if you _want_ to let an app have a single
| picture of you for a profile pic, but the only permission you
| can grant is "can view all of my photos", and then the app
| uploads all of your photos to their server?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The article links to this page:
|
| https://developers.googleblog.com/en/google-photos-picker-ap...
|
| The utm_source=chatgpt.com is amusing. What Will
| No Longer Work after March 31, 2025 Accessing albums and
| media items not uploaded by your app: The Library API will no
| longer allow access to the elements in a user's library that were
| not uploaded by your app. Instead, you can use the Picker API.
|
| It looks like they're creating a specific way for photo frames to
| be granted access to shared albums, but the linked page doesn't
| say how a photo frame developer can get access to that:
|
| https://support.google.com/photos/thread/326122731
|
| https://support.google.com/photos/answer/9458709?sjid=162165...
| xeonmc wrote:
| You will own nothing and be happy. Not even your family photos.
| philips wrote:
| Filed an issue to remove googlephotos from rclone since removeing
| the library.readonly scope will completely break that.
| https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/8434
|
| What a terrible decision by Google.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Looks like it doesn't take effect for another ten days?
|
| Rcloning a few years of old photos on Google Photos was on my
| todo anyway, guess that's happening this weekend.
| wlindley wrote:
| And again, There is no cloud, only someone else's computer.
| ketralnis wrote:
| This is exactly why even as a programmer I don't own pretty much
| any tech crap at all. No cloud connected home automation, photo
| frames, voice assistant, smart lock, wifi washing machine,
| nothing. The whole industry is just too brittle and unreliable
| and your money will evaporate the moment some product manager
| doesn't want to schedule a bug fix and kills the product instead
| because it's easier than meeting the promises that you already
| made. I minimise the number of computers and phones and whatever
| else to what I'm willing to spend a bunch of time updating and
| maintaining.
| philipov wrote:
| _especially_ as a programmer.
| righthand wrote:
| All of our technology is presented as seemless, integrated,
| secure, and robust and couldn't be further from the truth.
| jdmg94 wrote:
| after working at Amazon for a couple of years I ended up
| closing my AWS account
| Larrikin wrote:
| As a programmer you should look into Home Assistant and the
| self hosted community in general. You can achieve a lot and
| don't have to shut yourself out of legitimate technological
| improvements that are limited by some other company's cloud.
| Carrok wrote:
| Yea, I have plenty of home automation, all of which operates
| just fine without any external internet connection
| whatsoever. You just have to do a little research on what to
| buy.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Increasingly, a lot of those "legitimate technological
| improvements" are completely destroying interoperability.
| Google, in particular, has been making a lot of such annoying
| moves in the past couple years, on Android, GSuite, WearOS,
| and now Photos.
| psadauskas wrote:
| A tech enthusiast has all the latest gadgets and gizmos,
| everything connected to the cloud, and loves showing it off to
| guests.
|
| Someone who works in tech, the most advanced technology they
| own is a laser printer from 2005, and they keep a loaded gun
| next to it in case it makes a funny noise.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Oh ffs, I just migrated my entire extended family to Google
| Photos for my elders' picture frames (it was the only option
| which didn't involve a steeply priced subscription to their
| service; by the way I was not involved in acquiring these frames
| in the first place). I'll eat my hat if they get a firmware
| update.
| ge96 wrote:
| Sir Peter Beck?
| greatgib wrote:
| Again, they pretend to do the change for your privacy when their
| only goal is to have control and ensure to use your data as
| hostage to upsell you their own products and services...
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