Sync with Google Photos, Flickr or Apple Photos

Feature
1

I was wondering if someone had tried to use Syncthing to keep images of a Google Photos album (or Flickr, Apple Photos) in sync with a folder on a Raspberry Pi? I saw some people backing up their images from Google Photos but I was wondering how this could be done with Syncthing. Thanks for any ideas!

2

This is out of scope of Syncthing, and for a couple of good reasons, too:

  • these services tend to change their APIs, and this would require constant monitoring and support of these changes by Syncthing developers, which is hardly feasible besause
  • Syncthing is a file synchronization tool. Google Photos API (not sure about the others) doesn’t deal with files, it deals with images. The file you get when you download an image is not the same file you’ve uploaded. It simply makes no sense for Syncthing.

You could always use some tool to have a local folder on a Raspberry Pi have all the pictures from your Google Photos (or other online picture storage). There are lots of tools out there that were made for exactly that purpose (I wrote and support one myself, but I’m not saying mine is the best there is), and maintainers of those tools are supposedly committed to keep track of API changes and such so that those tools keep being functonal.

And then nothing stops you from adding that folder on your Pi to Syncthing and syncing it out to your other devices. I do just that, it’s totally possible.

3

Hello Evgeny, thanks very much for pointing me in the right direction.

There are lots of tools out there that were made for exactly that purpose (I wrote and support one myself, but I’m not saying mine is the best there is), and maintainers of those tools are supposedly committed to keep track of API changes and such so that those tools keep being functional.

I did now find rclone which I got to work but I am curious which tool you are supporting.

4

I love and use rclone for Google Drive sync, that’s a very solid piece of software. They didn’t support Photos API backup last summer (maybe they do now, didn’t check), so I forked, fixed and maintain a little tool for just the Photos backup.

1 Like
5

Thanks, Evgeny!