Google Photos Backup

Command line interface to backup your Google Photos.

Build

In order to build google-photos-backup you'll have to generate a OAuth 2.0 client credential per instructions at Authentication.

$ export GOOGLE_PHOTOS_BACKUP_CLIENT_ID=<client_id>
$ export GOOGLE_PHOTOS_BACKUP_CLIENT_SECRET=<client_secret>
$ cargo build --release

If you use one of the pre-built binaries, you don't need to worry as they already include a client_id and client_secret.

Usage

First run

The first time you run google-photos-backup, you'll have to authenticate with your Google account and authorize google-photos-backup. It will ask for permissions twice (both permissions are needed for the read and listing operations on Albums and MediaItems).

The second screen will ask you to copy&paste a code into the console.

The screens for authorisation will look like this:

Once you authorise google-photos-backup, we store your tokens locally and use that without asking again. If you ever need to re-authenticate, just delete the credentials.json file and re-run google-photos-backup.

Running the program only requires you to provide the folder path where you want to download the media and albums to:

$ ./google-photos-backup BackupFolder

Shared Albums

By default, google-photos-backup doesn't try to download shared albums. To include shared albums in the downloads, use the --shared-albums flag.

When you download shared albums, we download the images directly into the folder, instead of linking to images in the BackupFolder. I prefer that behaviour but if you have feedback on this, please let me know!

$ ./google-photos-backup --shared-albums BackupFolder

Filtering

For now, you can filter on an album title, and media filename and description. The flags, respectively are:

• --album-filter - filter on album title
• --media-filter - filter on media filename (or description)

Let's suppose you want to download only albums with "Vacation" in their title. You issue the following:

$ ./google-photos-backup --album-filter "Vacation" BackupFolder

The string after --album-filter is a regular expression, so you can do more complicated filtering:

$ ./google-photos-backup --album-filter "^Vacation.*2018$" BackupFolder

The above will filter for albums that start with "Vacation" and end with "2018".

If you want to download only media that has the mp4 extension and from albums with reef in the title, you can do the folllowing:

$ ./google-photos-backup --album-filter "reef" --media-filter "\.mp4$" BackupFolder

License

This project is under the Apache License Version 2.0.