Announcing my Upload-to-Google-Photos Plugin for Lightroom: Prepare to be Disappointed

Six years after Google unveiled their Google + social network with photo hosting, with heavy emphasis on photographers, and a couple of years after Google shut down Picasa Web Albums, the sort-of-backdoor way to upload photos to Google, Google has finally released a photo-upload API, so that I can make a Google Photos plugin for Adobe Lightroom.

Sort of.

What Google allows at this point is extremely limited, and I don't hold much hope that it'll expand.

As of today's initial release, the plugin can:

  1. create an album in Google Photos
  2. upload photos and video to such albums.

That's it. Nothing more. The plugin can't upload to existing albums or any album not made by the plugin.

The plugin can't delete or update photos, even ones it uploaded in the first place, so we can't make a publish service.

From the employee-developer interaction I've seen so far, I don't hold much hope for this API.

More information, and updates as they happen, on the plugin's home page.


All 2 comments so far, oldest first...

The Google photo api have a limit cota per day ???? after transfert 2000 picture i have message of cota ??

Yes, Google does have API quotas/limits. If you run into them a lot, let me know and I can ask Google about increasing them. —Jeffrey

— comment by Deny Cardinal on June 17th, 2018 at 4:07am JST (6 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

This is hopefully the beginning of a wonderful API reboot. FYI, there is an open feature request with Adobe to “elegantly” integrate Lightroom and Google Photos. This may be bad for you if Adobe productizes the integration. But it could also be good if Google simply improves the API based on a request from Adobe.

— comment by BW on June 26th, 2018 at 12:21pm JST (6 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink
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