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.

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.

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?

Good thing the existing API let you restrict it to "can view specific album" already.

Now google is making it cancerous and awful and making it specific photos only. Probably to sell a yet to be announced photo frame lol.

How is this relevant? Wouldn’t you just grant access to the single photo? Or just create an album with a single photo?

The existing functionality was sufficient. This new functionality does not improve security.

No, users must be protected for their own sake. You cannot be allowed to trade off convenience for privacy. It’s too important. M

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.

Wouldn't using Google Takeout do that already? I thought that was the point, to take out your data?

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.

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.

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?

Yes, no automation and no incremental backups makes things so annoying.

You can change to archive size to 50GB per file.

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.)

Just... get the TGZ then?

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.

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.

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.

I tried dozens of times to get it to upload to OneDrive and it always failed.

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.