picsync

Picsync

⚠ Hobby Project rarely updated: Please check "last updated" date; I've stopped actively maintaining this project.

This syncs pictures from Google Photos albums to Nixplay Seed wifi-enabled picture frames.

Installation

You can get the latest build as a container:

docker pull gcr.io/picsync-build/github.com/andrewjjenkins/picsync:master-latest

or you can build it locally (go 1.17):

git clone https://github.com/andrewjjenkins/picsync
cd picsync
go build ./cmd/picsync
./picsync --help

Google API Key Setup

Note: This step is required until the app is approved by Google and we can get permanent API keys. This requires you to apply for your own Google API keys (as if you were a developer).

Google's generic instructions are here. Note that you are choosing:

• Credentials type: OAuth 2.0 Client IDs
• Application type: Desktop app
• Name: Picsync (or something meaningful to you)

You will get a "Client ID" and a "Client secret". Put these into a file called .picsync-credentials.yaml:

googlephotos:
  api:
    key: "665...."  # The Client ID
    secret: "GO..." # The Client secret

When you complete picsync googlephotos login later, you will get a warning about an unapproved app named Picsync (or whatever you chose) wanting read-only access to google photos data. Check that it is the same as the Name you chose above.

Setup

There are two config files:

• picsync.yaml: General config and synchronizing rules.
• .picsync-credentials.yaml: Credentials to download/upload photos.

You should treat the credentials file as a secret and not share it with anyone. If you accidentally leak it, you should de-authorize the Picsync app from your accounts and then re-setup.

A picsync.yaml file says what to sync where. You list the target albums (in Nixplay) and then describe what the source(s) for those albums. Once picsync is running, then those target albums will always be kept up-to-date with what is in the sources. See picsync.yaml for details.

# List each target album you want to sync to in Nixplay.
# Picsync will:
#   1. Create the album (if it doesn't exit)
#   2. Upload all photos from each source into the album.
#   3. Delete all photos in the album not in any source.
#   4. Create/update a playlist called "ss_<album.name>", containing the
#      photos from that album.
albums:
# This will create/update the nixplay album named "test2022", and
# create/update the nixplay playlist called "ss_test2022"
- name: AllMyStuff
  # A list of sources to pull images from.
  sources:
    googlephotos:
    - <ID for a googlephotos album>
    - <ID for additional googlephotos album>
    - <ID for shared googlephotos album>
  # If true, do not actually do anything, just report what would be done.
  #dryRun: true
  # If false, do not delete photos from nixplay albums (we only add)
  #delete: false
  # If true, force publishing the playlist even if nothing has changed.  This
  # can help fix issues if the nixplay albums or playlists get corrupted.
  #forcePublish: true

# Repeat the sync every interval forever, rather than running once and exiting.
# Can be any string parseable by time.ParseInterval
# Some examples:
# every: 10m
every: 1h

# If long-running, serve prometheus-compatible metrics
# This port should not be exposed to the internet
prometheus:
  # Listen on port 1971 on every interface
  listen: ":1971"
# If long-running, serve pprof profiles via port 8080
# This port should not be exposed to the internet
pprof:
  listen: ":8080"

The easiest way to create the .picsync-credentials.yaml file is to run picsync googlephotos login. This will give you a URL you should open in a browser where you're signed in to google, and ask you to authorize the Picsync app to read-only access to your Google Photos data. Once you authorize it, the app will print out what you should put into the .picsync-credentials.yaml file. (You can avoid printing the details to the console using picsync googlephotos login -o .picsync-credentials.yaml).

You should add a block to this with your username/password for Nixplay.

When complete it will look like:

# Keep this file confidential.
# If you lose it, de-authorize nixplay-sync from your Google Photos account and repeat 'picsync googlephotos login'
nixplay:
  username: "helloworld"
  password: "changeme"

googlephotos:
  access:
    token_type: "Bearer"
    access_token: "..."
    refresh_token: "..."
    expiry: "2022-09-21..."

Listing

As a trial run and to discover the API ID for the Google Photo source albums, you can run picsync googlephotos list, which will print the albums you have:

$ picsync googlephotos list
Album "Seattle":
  ID: AP5WpWre...
  Items: 5
  Google Photos: https://photos.google.com/lr/album/AP5WpWre...
Album "xmasphoto":
  ID: AP5WpWoif...
  Items: 1
  Google Photos: https://photos.google.com/lr/album/AP5WpWoif...

(the ID and URL have been truncated in the above example).

The ID is what you need to fill in the sources. For instance, if I wanted to sync both the "Seattle" and "xmasphoto" albums to my frame, my picsync.yaml would look like:

albums:
  name: AllMyStuff
  sources:
    googlephotos:
    - AP5WpWre...
    - AP5WpWoif...

To list albums that were shared with you, but created by someone else, use the --shared option.

$ picsync googlephotos list --shared
Album "xmasphoto":
  ID: AP5WpWoif...
  Items: 1
  Google Photos: https://photos.google.com/lr/album/AP5WpWoif...

IDs for shared albums work the same as for ones you created - you can use a shared album ID as a source for a frame. You can also use combinations of shared and created-by-you.

You can also list the photos in a particular album using picsync googlephotos list <albumID>:

Media Item "IMG_20140225_072829.jpg":
  Google Photos ID: AP5WpWod...
  Description: Space Needle from my hotel window
  Google Photos: https://photos.google.com/lr/album/AP5WpWre.../photo/AP5WpWod...
  Raw: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/lr/...

Running

Once you have setup, just run it:

picsync sync

This will sync all photos from the source albums to the destination album.

If an album of that name doesn't exist in Nixplay, it will be created.

Nixplay also has a concept of Playlist (formerly known as Slideshow), which would let you pick parts of an album without deleting the whole album or do other tricks. We don't need any of that, but we have to have a playlist because that is the only thing you can actually load onto a Nixplay frame. So we make a playlist/slideshow called "ss_" and automatically sync the album into the playlist. So, for the above example, the Nixplay album is called AllMyStuff and the Nixplay playlist is called "ss_AllMyStuff".

Syncing Playlists to Frames

Once successful, you will get a message like:

Could not find playlist "ss_test" (did not find playlist "ss_test" in 10 playlists), creating
If this works, you must then assign the playlist ss_test to frames - this program will not do that (but it will update the playlist once you've assigned it)
Published 29 photos to playlist ss_test

This means we've successfully created the playlist and synced the photos to it, but it isn't yet visible on any Nixplay smart frames. We don't manage which playlists are mapped to which frames (and don't manage frames at all).

Go to https://app.nixplay.com/#/frames/ and click on a frame, then click "Enable Playlist" for ss_test and Nixplay will automatically sync to the frame.

This is a one-time step for a playlist - once a playlist is mapped to one or more frames, we can update the photos in the playlist and Nixplay will automatically sync them out for us. You don't need to log back into Nixplay.

Looping

You can cause the syncer to run periodically by setting the "every" property in picsync.yaml:

albums:
- name: AllMyStuff
  sources:
    googlephotos:
    - <ID for a googlephotos album>

# Repeat the sync every interval forever, rather than running once and exiting.
# Can be any string parseable by time.ParseInterval
# Some examples:
# every: 10m
# every: 1h
every: 1h

Caching

Google provides a stable ID for each photo, but does not directly provide any sort of hash of the contents via API. Nixplay does provide an MD5 for each photo in an album via the API.

We create a scratch file picsync-metadata-cache.db that is an SQLite database containing a cache of Google photo IDs and the hashes of the photos they refer to. This means each time we loop, we only need to download photos in the albums that we've never seen before.

We currently use the MD5 hash because it is the only thing available directly in the Nixplay API. We assume you are not using us to protect against attackers using your credentials to put hash-colliding photos into your Nixplay account (you should use a good password instead!).

You don't need to do anything to initialize picsync-metadata-cache.db, and if you remove it, we'll re-create it automatically when we first run.

Monitoring

If you are in the long-running mode (using "every 1h" or similar), then you can also specify a port to serve prometheus metrics on:

prometheus:
  # Listen on port 1971 on every interface
  listen: ":1971"

  # Listen on port 20000 but only loopback IPv4
  #listen: "127.0.0.1:20000"

The file k8s/podmonitor.yaml contains an example PodMonitor that tells the Prometheus Operator how to scrape picsync.

Here's a Grafana dashboard showing picsync in action:

For a complete list of metrics, see doc/monitoring.md

Running in Kubernetes

You can run picsync as a pod in Kubernetes.

First you must run picsync googlecloud login -o .picsync-credentials.yaml to set credentials.

kubectl create ns picsync
kubectl create configmap -n picsync picsync --from-file=picsync.yaml=./picsync.yaml
kubectl create secret -n picsync generic picsync-credentials --from-file=.picsync-credentials.yaml=./.picsync-credentials.yaml
kubectl apply -n picsync k8s/deployment.yaml

Comparison to Nixplay Built-In

At the time this project was started, Nixplay didn't have functionality to pull from SmugMug or Google Photos. There is now a built-in Google Photos integration.

However, it wants access to all your google photos data, and I wanted to limit its scope to read-only, and ideally read-only of just particular albums for security.
As well, you can see clearly that picsync is doing nothing nefarious with any of the photo data (just really simple reads from Google Photos), and all the credentials stay on your system.

I had a lot of trouble ever getting any of the built-in dynamic album functionality to work with Google Photos (though that was a few years ago). This may not be a relevant complaint anymore.

This project supports syncing from shared google photos albums (ones that you didn't create, but were shared with you). Nixplay's web app does not (as of Sept 2022).

Roadmap/Help Wanted

1. Getting the app generally approved so that users don't have to bring their own API client ID

License

Copyright 2018 Andrew Jenkins andrewjjenkins@gmail.com

Licensed under the terms of the Apache 2.0 license (see LICENSE)