In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to download photos or videos to your PC from your Google Photos account using Google Photos API and few other libraries in Python.

From my older videos, I went over how to use Google Photos API (upload media files, get album/media item metadata, search media files) in Python. And this tutorial is a follow up how we can use the same Google Photos API to export the files.

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Google_Photos_Backup.py

import os
from Google import Create_Service
import pandas as pd # pip install pandas
import requests # pip install requests

pd.set_option('display.max_columns', 100)
pd.set_option('display.max_rows', 150)
pd.set_option('display.max_colwidth', 150)
pd.set_option('display.width', 150)
pd.set_option('expand_frame_repr', True)

CLIENT_SECRET_FILE = 'client_secret_GoogleCloudDemo.json'
API_NAME = 'photoslibrary'
API_VERSION = 'v1'
SCOPES = ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/photoslibrary']

service = Create_Service(CLIENT_SECRET_FILE, API_NAME, API_VERSION, SCOPES)

myAblums = service.albums().list().execute()
myAblums_list = myAblums.get('albums')
dfAlbums = pd.DataFrame(myAblums_list)
travel_album_id = dfAlbums[dfAlbums['title'] == 'Travel']['id'].to_string(index=False).strip()

def download_file(url:str, destination_folder:str, file_name:str):
    response = requests.get(url)
    if response.status_code == 200:
        print('Downloading file {0}'.format(file_name))
        with open(os.path.join(destination_folder, file_name), 'wb') as f:
            f.write(response.content)
            f.close()

media_files = service.mediaItems().search(body={'albumId': travel_album_id}).execute()['mediaItems']

destination_folder = r'.\Photos Backup'

for media_file in media_files:
    file_name = media_file['filename']
    download_url = media_file['baseUrl'] + '=d'
    download_file(download_url, destination_folder, file_name)

Google.py

import pickle
import os
from google_auth_oauthlib.flow import Flow, InstalledAppFlow
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from googleapiclient.http import MediaFileUpload
from google.auth.transport.requests import Request


def Create_Service(client_secret_file, api_name, api_version, *scopes):
    print(client_secret_file, api_name, api_version, scopes, sep='-')
    CLIENT_SECRET_FILE = client_secret_file
    API_SERVICE_NAME = api_name
    API_VERSION = api_version
    SCOPES = [scope for scope in scopes[0]]
    print(SCOPES)

    cred = None

    pickle_file = f'token_{API_SERVICE_NAME}_{API_VERSION}.pickle'
    # print(pickle_file)

    if os.path.exists(pickle_file):
        with open(pickle_file, 'rb') as token:
            cred = pickle.load(token)

    if not cred or not cred.valid:
        if cred and cred.expired and cred.refresh_token:
            cred.refresh(Request())
        else:
            flow = InstalledAppFlow.from_client_secrets_file(CLIENT_SECRET_FILE, SCOPES)
            cred = flow.run_local_server()

        with open(pickle_file, 'wb') as token:
            pickle.dump(cred, token)

    try:
        service = build(API_SERVICE_NAME, API_VERSION, credentials=cred)
        print(API_SERVICE_NAME, 'service created successfully')
        return service
    except Exception as e:
        print('Unable to connect.')
        print(e)
        return None