Cloud Photo Storage (Google Photos) Integration

[Dropbear67]

Hi All

I have PicFrame running on a RPi 5 with 4GB of RAM grabbing images from SMB Share and that is working well.
I know I can manually roll my own solution using rclone to sync a local directory with my Google Photos repository but I would dearly love to be able to cut out that middle man and pull the images directly from Google Photos.

I have some python experience and have dabbled with grabbing images from Google Photos and it seems to work well. Would it be possible to add this functionality?

[sapnho]

Hi @Dropbear67, It's great to see you experimenting with the Pi 5. Still a few bugs to be ironed out.

As to Google Photos: People have so many different ways of adding their images to their digital picture frame. If there is an easy way to add it to Pi3D, that would be nice. But many people told me that using these instructions, it was really easy to get it going.

[Dropbear67]

Hi. Thanks for the reply. Yeh I am aware you can use rclone to in order to sync google photos with a local storage, but I was thinking more along the lines of pulling the photos directly from google photos without the need to store them locally on the file system (or connected NAS).

MMM-GooglePhotos does something similar, which is a plug in for MagicMirror2 and that works well, but it lacks any support for MQTT and changing the actual folder that the plugin is looking at without a restart. I love the MQTT aspect of picframe and how we can dynamically change directories on the fly.

Since writing this suggestion I have fleshed out my thoughts a little more.
What would be ideal would be to have a named list of sources, defined in a file somewhere (jason, or yaml) and you could dynamically choose between these sources - in much the same way as we can choose directories now).

Expanding the idea of directories, we could include something like
[ name: "Holidays",
type: "FileSystem".
location: "/home/pi/Pictures/Holidays" ]

[name: "Family",
type: "GooglePhotos"
location: "Family Photos" ] #Where location in this instance is a folder name

If you have a look at MMM-GooglePhotos integration they generate a token from Google Photos which allows access. It's a little mucking about (3-4 minutes) work setting it up but it's a do once thing and forget it