Comment by akersten
6 days ago
This is an amazing idea but do I have to run Google takeout every time I want to update the data[0]? Unfortunately that's such a a cumbersome process that I don't think I'd use this. But if my timeline could update in near real time this would be a killer app
Yeah. Major thorn in my side. I spent hours trying to automate that process by using Chrome headless, and it kinda worked, until I realized that I needed to physically authenticate not just once, but every 10 minutes. So, it basically can't be automated since 2FA is needed so often.
In practice, I do a Takeout once or twice a year. (I recommend this even if not using Timelinize, so you can be sure to have your data.)
I thought you could set up an automatic Takeout export periodically, and choose the target to be your Google Drive. Then via a webapp oauth you could pull the data that way. Frequency was limited (looks like it says the auto export is “every 2 months for 1 year”). So hardly realtime, but seems useful and (relatively) easy? Does a method like that not work for your intentions?
Will have to look into that. Sounds like it could be expensive but maybe worth it.
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Some kind of companion app that runs on my phone and streams the latest data (photos, location history, texts, etc ) back to the timeline would probably be more tractable for live updates. But that is probably a wildly different scope than the import based workflow. This is very cool regardless.
For sure.
About 5-6 years ago, Timelinize actually used only the Google Photos API. It didn't even support imports from Takeout yet. The problem is the API strips photos of crucial metadata including location, and gives you nerfed versions of your data. Plus the rate limits were so unbearable, I eventually ripped this out.
But yeah, an app that runs on your phone would be a nice QoL improvement.
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Syncthing from phone to a directory on PC?
That's what I do. Though I don't then put them into any system. Yet.
How easy would it be to integrate this with immich (instead of needing the access to google photo)?
Probably not hard. Timelinize's data sources have a standard API with just 2 methods [0], so it should be fairly trivial to implement depend on how accessible Immich is.
To clarify, you don't grant access to Google Photos, you just do the Takeout from https://takeout.google.com to download your data first.
[0]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/timelinize/timelinize@v0.0.23/...
I did this by creating my own small password manager.
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