chadn / gphotos-albums

Using Google Photos API, list user's albums

GPhotos-Albums

App Overview

This is a Node.js web application that simply lists album info from a user using Google Photos API and Google OAuth 2.0.

Example Website

User will need to be logged in to Google, and give read permissions for samo.org on the first use. User can do this at https://gphotos.samo.org/

Background

As author of this code, I created this mainly to serve my own need of seeing all the names of my albums in one place. I have many albums, and Web app and Mobile app do not make this easy.

I also wanted to experiment with Google APIs and Google Developers project, especially curious what data is made available about a project.

The code does use Google's OAuth 2.0, and experimenting with this is also a reason I created this app.

This app is based on chadn/google-photos, which is forked from from googlesamples/google-photos, which is built using Express.js and Material Design Lite.

Set up

Before you can run this sample, you must set up a Google Developers project and configure authentication credentials. Follow the get started guide to complete these steps:

1. Set up a Google Developers Project and enable the Google Photos Library API.
2. In your project, set up new OAuth credentials for a web server application. Set the authorized JavaScript origin to http://127.0.0.1 and the authorized redirect URL to http://127.0.0.1:8080/auth/google/callback if you are running the app locally.
3. The console will display your authentication credentials. Add the Client ID and Client secret to the file config.js, replacing the placeholder values:

// The OAuth client ID from the Google Developers console.
config.oAuthClientID = 'ADD YOUR CLIENT ID';

// The OAuth client secret from the Google Developers console.
config.oAuthclientSecret = 'ADD YOUR CLIENT SECRET';

You are now ready to run the sample:

1. Ensure Node.JS and npm are installed and available on your system. You need a recent Node.js version (v14 or later) to run this sample.
2. Install dependencies: Run npm install,
3. Start the app: Run node app.js.

By default, the app will listen on port 8080. Open a web browser and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080 to access the app.

Troubleshooting

Make sure that you have configured the Client ID and the Client secret in the configuration file config.js. Also check that the URLs configured for these credentials match how you access the server. By default this is configured for 127.0.0.1 (localhost) on port 8080.

You can also start the app with additional debug logging by setting the DEBUG environment variable to true. For example:

DEBUG=TRUE node app.js

API Use and code overview

The app is built using the Express.js framework and the ejs templating system.

First, the user has to log in via OAuth 2.0 and authorize the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/photoslibrary.readonly scope. (See the file config.js.) Once authenticated, photos are loaded into the photo frame via search or from an album.

The app is split into the backend (app.js) and the front end (static/...). The front end make AJAX requests to the backend. The backend returns album data directly from the Google Photos Library API that are parsed and rendered in the browser.