Google Photos Scraper
I love taking photos, but I don't love the hassle of hosting them myself. I already pay Google to store my pictures, so why should I have to re-upload them just to display a gallery on my own website?
The catch is that Google Photos doesn't make it easy to get simple, direct links to your images. I just wanted a clean list of URLs for an album I could plug into my site.
I'm kind of into photography. About a year ago I bought this fancy S5II Full Frame Mirrorless Camera. It was mostly to use as a webcam for zoom meetings but I always thought photography and film were really cool. I took a photography class growing up and I took a lot of pictures back when I worked at the PR firm so I had a general sense of how to shoot. I'm still an amateur but It's fun for me.
You've probably seen a theme of me using GitHub Copilot so of course I vibe coded most of this project. I pointed to blog posts I found, asked it to come up with a plan. It wrote the plan to a file. Then I wrote all the code with Claude Sonnet 4.
Claude was caught up on the lazy loading images and scrolling through them properly. It did figure it out but not well enough to exhaustively get a full list of images. I was able to figure out the proper scrolling technique and we continued on with the headless automation solution.
Check out the code on GitHub:
Or run the tool yourself:
npx google-photos-scraper https://photos.app.goo.gl/kXEc4X8Lfrh7qEKdA
It works great and was fairly easy to setup. To prove it, here are some photos from my recent trip to Spain, all sourced using the tool.
