Fetching complete Google Photos album webpage from Apps Script - google-apps-script

Question

I've been trying to scrape a publicly-shared photo album I have on Google Photos: sharing the album provides a link along the format of photos.app.goo.gl/{SOME_ID}. The goal is to be able to retrieve the individual photo URLs (the URLs that don't expire, following the format lh3.googleusercontent.com and which can then be embedded onto any other website within an tag).
I would like to do this in Google Apps Script and have tried the following:
var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch("https://photos.app.goo.gl/{SOME_ID}");
Logger.log(response.getContentText());
However, the response doesn't display any of the images as if the page would instead need to be loaded some more, even though I'm testing this on an album with just 2 photos. If I inspect the page manually, I can clearly see the images + image links along the lh3.googleusercontent.com format. What should I change to my fetch request?
I've seen other implementations (outside of Apps Script) using Axios that managed to get the URLs I want, but haven't found a way of importing the Axios library into Apps Script.

Answer 1

Answer:
You can use the Google Photos API in Apps Script to get the individual photo URLs of a shared album.
More Information:
UrlFetchApp.fetch() returns an HTTPResponse object within Apps Script which contains Headers, HTML Content and other information such as the HTTP response code, as if the page was being fetched and loaded via a browser. There is also a set of URL Fetch limits as detailed on the Quotas for Google Services page which result in you getting a truncated response for sufficiently large pages.
The Photos API however has methods which are specifically designed for the purpose you are describing, and this data can be retrieved from the mediaItems REST resource. Bear in mind however, that this returns all photos and not ones that are in a specific album; further processing would need to be done from there.
Example Code:
After creating a new project in the Developers Console, you need to enable the Photos API from the APIs & Services > Library menu item, and then link it to your Apps Script Project by going to the script UI and following Resources > Cloud Platform project. Add the project number of the project just created in the Developer's Console and press Set Project.
Here is a small code snippet which will return photos from your Google Photos account, and log the individual photo URLs in the Logger:
function logPhotoUrls() {
var url = 'https://photoslibrary.googleapis.com/v1/mediaItems';
var options = {
headers: {
Authorization: 'Bearer ' + ScriptApp.getOAuthToken()
},
method: 'get',
muteHttpExceptions: false
};
var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url, options);
for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
Logger.log(JSON.parse(response.getContentText()).mediaItems[i].productUrl);
}
}
You will also need to edit your appscript.json, which you can see by following View > Show manifest file to include the following:
{
"oauthScopes": ["https://www.googleapis.com/auth/photoslibrary.readonly",
"https://www.googleapis.com/auth/script.external_request"]
}
References:
Google Apps Script - Quotas for Google Services
Google Photos Library API
Google Photos API - Get started with REST
Google Photos API - Method mediaItems:list
Google Developers Console
Google Apps Script - Class UrlFetchApp
Google Apps Script - Manifest structure