Potential Shutdown of Google Photos Support from March 2025

Many of you received an email from Google in the month of September 2024 regarding a change to the Google Photos API. This topic was also brought up on this very support forum.

Over the past few days I have been looking at the impact of this change, and it increasingly looks like I will not be able to support it via Photonic. The new “Picker API” is significantly different from the current “Photos API”, and drastically cripples whatever limited functionality is offered in the Photos API.

Here are a few things the Picker API cannot do:

• Display a listing of all your albums
• Display a listing of all photos in an album, dynamically (i.e., if you add a photo to an album, you have to explicitly add it to the Photonic gallery as well)
• Display shared albums
• Display all your photos dynamically

Moreover, the Picker API dramatically changes the flow of building your galleries. E.g. unlike the current functionality, you cannot copy and paste a shortcode or a block and simply replace an id (via ACF or other automated means).

The changes to the API have caused frustration amongst developers worldwide (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41604241), and some have already shutdown their projects (see https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/issues/511) because of the insurmountable challenges.

To compound matters, Google has modified its API policy and included clauses that will cause third-party apps to violate their policy. Quoting from the link:

• Do not use Google Photos APIs as a replacement for a large-scale content delivery network (CDN).
• Do not make a substitute for Google Photos. For example, do not use the APIs to create a general purpose photo gallery app.

So, it looks like I will have to close down the Google Photos branch of Photonic in the next month or so, as there is no way around the challenges. I will keep exploring options, but at this point it seems like a losing battle.