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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
> 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?
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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:
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.)
