| name | google-photos-link |
| description | Download and view photos from a public Google Photos share link (photos.app.goo.gl or photos.google.com/share). Use whenever a Google Photos link should be viewed, described, or analyzed — web_fetch alone returns album metadata, never the pixels. |
Google Photos Link Access
Why this skill exists
A Google Photos share link does not point at an image file. It points at a
JavaScript web app. Calling web_fetch on the link returns only the album
shell: a title, an og:image thumbnail, and a list of links to per-photo
pages. It does not give you the photos themselves. To actually see the
images you have to walk one extra layer: open each photo's page, pull out its
direct lh3.googleusercontent.com image URL, and download the bytes. This skill
encodes that walk so you don't rediscover it each time.
Quickest path: run the script
A tested helper does the whole walk. Prefer it over doing the steps by hand.
python3 scripts/fetch_google_photos.py "<share_url>" --out ./photos --width 2048
Other modes:
python3 scripts/fetch_google_photos.py "<url>" --original
python3 scripts/fetch_google_photos.py "<url>" --list
The script accepts the short link, the full album link, or a single-photo link.
After it finishes, view the downloaded files — downloading is not the goal;
seeing the images is. Report what you see.
What the link looks like (so you can sanity-check it)
| Form | Example |
|---|
| Short | https://photos.app.goo.gl/C3aVzvb4GpZ9NA2e8 |
| Full album | https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Qip…?key=RDdF… |
| Single photo | https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Qip…/photo/AF1Qip…?key=RDdF… |
The key= token is the share credential. If a link has no key, it is almost
certainly a private album and this approach will hit a login wall.
The manual method (for debugging, or if the script breaks)
Do this by hand only when the script fails and you need to see where.
-
Resolve the link. web_fetch (or curl -sL) the share URL. The short
goo.gl link 302-redirects to photos.google.com/share/<ALBUM_ID>?key=<KEY>.
The returned HTML's og:title tells you the album name and photo count.
-
Collect photo IDs from the album page. The album HTML contains one link
per photo of the form /share/<ALBUM_ID>/photo/<PHOTO_ID>?key=<KEY>. Extract
every <PHOTO_ID> and de-duplicate while preserving order:
grep -oE '/photo/[A-Za-z0-9_-]+'. (The album page does not contain the
full-size image URLs — only the cover, via og:image. That's why step 3 is
needed.)
-
Get each photo's direct image URL. Fetch each photo page. Its HTML embeds
the real image at a thumbnail size, e.g.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/<TOKEN>=s250-k-no. Grab the base
(everything before =):
grep -oE 'https://lh3\.googleusercontent\.com/[A-Za-z0-9_/-]+' | head -1.
-
Resize via the URL suffix, then download. The lh3 base URL is a
resizer. Append a suffix and curl the result:
=w2048-no → longest side 2048px, aspect preserved, no upscaling
(-no is what prevents upscaling and extra server processing).=w1280-no, =s1024, =w1920-h1080 → other size options.=d → the original bytes at full quality and native dimensions
(also the only way to pull the original of a video).
-
View the files. Open each downloaded JPEG with the view tool and
describe / analyze as asked.
Picking a size
- Just viewing / describing:
--width 2048 is plenty and keeps files small.
- Reading fine detail (text, engraving, small labels): try
--width 4096,
or --original to avoid re-compression artifacts. Note =w{N}-no never
upscales, so for an image whose original is smaller than N you'll get the
original size regardless.
- User wants the actual files to keep:
--original.
Limitations — know these before promising results
- Public link-shared albums only. If the album was shared privately to
specific Google accounts (no
key= in the URL), the pages return a sign-in
wall and there is nothing to scrape. Tell the user it needs to be shared "by
link" / "anyone with the link."
- Links can expire or be revoked. The owner can turn off link sharing at any
time, after which the same URL stops working.
- Videos: the per-photo page exposes a poster frame for stills easily; for
video,
=d on the base may fetch the original file, but playback/streaming
variants are out of scope here.
- Consent interstitials: in some regions Google serves a cookie-consent page
to non-browser clients. If the script returns 0 photos but the link works in a
browser, fall back to
curl -sL with a browser User-Agent and inspect the
HTML, or have the user open it in an incognito window to confirm it's public.
- Respect privacy. Only fetch links the user has supplied or clearly wants
opened. Don't enumerate or guess album/photo IDs.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|
| "no photos found" | private album / missing key | Confirm the link opens in an incognito window; ask owner to share by link |
| 0 photos but link works in browser | consent page or odd UA handling | Re-run with a browser User-Agent; inspect raw HTML for a redirect/consent form |
| Downloaded file isn't a valid image | grabbed an interstitial, not the image | Check file <name>; re-extract the lh3 base from the photo page |
| Image looks low-res | size suffix too small, or original is small | Use --width 4096 or --original; remember -no won't upscale |
Syntax error: "(" unexpected in a shell loop | script ran under /bin/sh, not bash | Use the Python helper, or write bash to a file and run bash file.sh |
