Google change is breaking some digital photo frames | Hacker News Reader

Google change is breaking some digital photo frames

theverge.com

65 pointstomsonj56 comments

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.

especially as a programmer.

All of our technology is presented as seemless, integrated, secure, and robust and couldn’t be further from the truth.

after working at Amazon for a couple of years I ended up closing my AWS account

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.

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.

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.

Legitamate technological improvements include thread, which allows local control of devices with no cloud servers involved, which lets you use home assistant or an equivalent

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.

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...

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.

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.

Takeout could also be an option

That's what I use to export photos. It's bad in almost every way, except for the fact that it works.

"you have downloaded this file too many times"

check out this project: https://github.com/rclone/gphotosdl

> While the change is designed to make your photo library more private, it’s also breaking how digital photo frames — such as those made by Aura and Cozyla — automatically update slideshows on their devices.

> Last month, Google announced that Google Photos slideshows would soon be available as ambient displays or screensavers on more third-party devices. The feature is currently available on Google Nest displays and Google TVs.

Sounds like anti-competitive behavior with privacy as the scape goat, imho. A feature for 3rd parties stops working as Google is rolling out that same feature for their own products?

same MO as manifest V3

And again, There is no cloud, only someone else's computer.

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?

> 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."

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)

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/picking-e...

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...

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...

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

Yeah but it directly contradicts where they say you can select albums. That's why it's confusing and unclear.

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.

Is it a huge net loss for Google though?

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.

Their internet services are just a hobby. Their money comes from advertising. You're not a customer, you're livestock for the marketers. Me too, come to that.

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...

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.

Sir Peter Beck?

Good, more security and better controls means third-party apps cannot simply scrape all of my photos.

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 change to archive size to 50GB per file.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

You will own nothing and be happy. Not even your family photos.

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