Why?

Google recently closed Google Domain, which made me think about my photos. I have more than 10k photos on Google Photos, and I don't want to download them one by one.

Currently, the Google Photos API does not allow downloading photos in their original quality. Google Takeout is slow and manual, and it does not support incremental photo downloads.

So, I was looking for a solution to download all my photos in their original quality and incrementally. I found gphotos-cdp, but it has issues and has not been updated in 3 years. So, I decided to write my own.

How it works?

This project uses Playwright to open Google Photos in a headless browser. It then starts downloading all the images from the last image to the top. It also downloads images incrementally and sorts them in year and month folders. It also saves the progress in a .lastdone file. So, if you stop the download in between, you can start from where you left off.

Installation

To get started with this project, follow these steps:

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/vikas5914/google-photos-backup

Install dependencies:

npm install
npx playwright install --with-deps chrome

Setup login session:

node setup.js

This will open a Chrome browser and ask you to log in to your Google Photos account. After logging in, either press ctrl+c or close the browser. This will save your login session in the session folder.

Create .lastdone file:

Create a .lastdone file in the root of the project. This file stores the starting point of the download.

touch .lastdone

Go to the Google Photos web app, scroll all the way to the bottom, find the last image, open it. Copy the resulting URL and then (you can use any text editor to edit this file):

echo -e "$URL" > .lastdone

Run the project:

node index.js

Run without headless mode:

node index.js --headless=false

Bugs

• If an image has no EXIF data, it will be saved in the download/1970/1 folder.

Credits

perkeep/gphotos-cdp

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details.