I’m a bit late to seeing this, but Google are changing their Photo API at the end of March 2025 to considerably reduce the scope. They don’t want people to use it as free CDN, and they don’t want people to build apps that emulate Google Photos.
All fair enough … their platform, their rules.
But I’m now going to have to migrate away the 500+ photos which I put in a Google album to display the snapshots page in my diary. It was convenient to take a photo, add a caption and move it to that folder and it would automatically appear on my website. My own personal instagram to record visual moments that inspire.
I know deep down that relying on platforms is a bad idea. I now need to do what I should have done all along and host the photos on my own site.
Steps I’ve taken so far are to download the Google Takeout for that album, and also ask ChatGPT for a script to parse the takeout file, reduce the photo size and upload them to wordpress preserving the caption and date.
I’ll test that slowly over the next month and hopefully get everything migrated. Next job will be to rebuild the gallery display from tagged items in the WordPress media library.
Finally, I’d like a way of getting new photos seamlessly from my phone to wordpress in future. I don’t have any great ideas for that yet, so it’ll be a manual upload until something better comes along.
Once these activities are complete, I will feel better overall that I have regained control of that part of my digital life.
Update: I’ve now completed the migration and wrote about the experience here.