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Jonathan
Asked: 2019-04-27 10:08:13 +0800 CST

How do I sync Google Photos to a hard drive directory?

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I take pictures on my Android phone, and I have them synced with Google Photos, which puts them on other devices immediately via the cloud.

How do I enable Google Photos to automatically sync to my Ubuntu laptop hard drive?

nautilus online-accounts google-drive

3 Answers

  1. The above answer will not work. Google stopped syncing Google photo with Google Drive awhile ago. If you want access to Google Drive then the above works great. If you want to mount Google Photo then there does not seem to be a solution. This program is useful for backing up and keeping in sync with Google Photo https://pypi.org/project/gphotos-sync/

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  2. Best Answer

    First, you must check the box to enable Google Photos folder in your Google Drive settings so that your Photos will be visible in Drive.

    A standard Ubuntu install has GNOME settings has a built in "Online Accounts" section to easily configure a drive in to show in nautilus File Viewer.

    You also have a few options to mimic the behavior of Dropbox clients there's OverGrive and Insync but I prefer to not have the files stored locally and for that I use Ocamlfuse.

    Ocamlfuse

    The creator made a PPA for it with .deb files for Ubunutu, run the following in a terminal to install the PPA:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alessandro-strada/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install google-drive-ocamlfuse

    Then, still in the terminal, run the following to get started:

    google-drive-ocamlfuse

    This will set up the configuration files and folders needed as well as launch your default browser so you can login to your google account.

    Next, back in the terminal, you will need to create a directory to mount your google drive in:

    mkdir ~/googledrive

    And finally to mount the drive so you can see your files, run:

    google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/googledrive

    It works similarly to nfs in that the files aren't actually copied to your computer so if you want to have them when you aren't connected to the internet, you will need to copy them to a local directory.

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  3. I use gphotos-sync and it's painless after setup.

    Mind that gphotos-sync only downloads your photos, it cannot upload!!

    You need to configure google-photos sharing in the google-cloud before use:

    Use these guides:

    https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Local_incremental_Google_Photos_backup_on_Ubuntu.html

    or.

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ck1679H8ifmZ_4eVbDeD_-jezIcZ-j6MlaNaeQiz7y0/edit

    When your ready go too:

    https://console.cloud.google.com/

    Create a new project. Name and location don't matter.

    Go to console.cloud.google.com/projectselector2/apis/library, select your new project, then select the Photos Library API. Click the big blue Enable button.

    Go to console.cloud.google.com/apis, select your project and go to OAuth Consent Screen. Select External.

    Fill in a name and click Save.

    In the menu bar, go to Credentials, Create Credentials, OAuth ClientID.

    Select type Desktop Application and give the client a name. I used gp_client.

    You'll see a confirmation screen. Afterwards, use the download arrow button to save the file as client_secret.json:

    enter image description here

    I saved it in my ~/Downloads folder and then moved it to the correct folder for gphotos-sync, creating it if it does not exist:

    the client_secret.json file has to be named as here.

    mkdir -p ~/.config/gphotos-sync/
cp ~/Downloads/client_secret.json ~/.config/gphotos-sync/client_secret.json

    Once you login to Google you might get an 'Unverified' warning, which, in this case, is fine.

    After this, rather complex process, it's time to install and then you can start using the software.

    python -m pip install --user gphotos-sync
gphotos-sync YOUR-DIRECTORY

    If you get an error when trying to sync then use this:

    gphotos-sync --new-token YOUR-DIRECTORY

    Here you have it on github:

    https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/

    https://github.com/somethingSomething78/gphotos-sync

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