Link / Upload from External Photo Albums#102

I keep a Google photo album for each of my vehicles, this is useful as I often take extensive pictures of the cars for stripdown / rebuild reference as well as capturing trips and days out.

Uploading pictures to Custodian will increase server costs for you, linking to Google photos might be an efficient way to enrich my garage.

This is an interesting idea… we could definitely support this for Google photos accounts with public URL’s. At the very least let people add links to it somewhere…

We’ve had a few requests like this about linking out to other platforms and tools for specific cars… we’re considering the idea of adding a section to the car pages which supports arbritraty links to other platforms for things like race results, fan instagram pages, google photo albums etc.

I too would like this feature. Its a bit of a faff to download the photos from Google Photos to a local device, and then upload them again. This would make things so muchs simpler, and I’m sure, as Ian said, it might save you some storage costs too.

Interesting. If we implemented something like this tooling (uppy), would that solve your issue?

It lets you pick files directly from different storage solutions.

Regarding the storage costs whilst it would be a saving for us and it’s kind of you to consider us @Swanny.uk & @Ian.cleary - I think it’d be much harder to be able to keep track of broken references to images which might move outside of our control breaking the experience for our users. I think we’d rather swallow the hosting costs and instead have more control over offering our users the best experience we can.

We dont want Google (for example) suddenly deciding to change the id’s on everyone photo albums XD (they’ve done it before) and your car’s history in Custodian getting broken because none of the references make sense anymore.

We are looking at upgrading our whole media hosting pipeline in the next few months to add support for some more features I can’t discuss yet. This could be a good opportunity to adjust the uploading method though.

Jeremy - you make a really good point about Google changing something at random - I clearly had my ‘ever the optimist’ hat on. I think you’re right, a way of integrating with a cloud storage solution to import the photo and you store it would be better.

I’ve taken a look at Uppy - that looks good, but can it integrate with the Google photos service itself, as Google removed the feature of being able to see the photo files themselves, in your Google Drive account, as they said it confused users. I was pretty fuming about it, because it makes drap/drop uploads so much easier having multiple ways to interact with their storage.

….having said that, I also use OneDrive and you can see the physical photo files, so that’d work for me.