gphotos-scraper/src/services/getPhotos.ts

A tool to extract public url and metadata from shared album

import { lookup } from "mime-types";
import type { GooglePhoto } from "../interfaces";
import { apiClient } from "./axiosClient";

const RPCID = "fDcn4b";
const BASE_URL = "https://photos.google.com/_/PhotosUi/data/batchexecute";

export const getPhotos = async (
	key: string,
	photoIds: string[],
): Promise<GooglePhoto[]> => {
	const queryData = photoIds.map((photoId) => [
		RPCID,
		JSON.stringify([photoId, null, key]),
	]);

	const params = new URLSearchParams();
	params.append("f.req", JSON.stringify([queryData]));

	const { data } = await apiClient.post(BASE_URL, params, {
		headers: {
			"Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded;charset=UTF-8",
		},
	});

	// Security: Anti-hijacking cleanup
	const cleanData = data.replace(/^\)\]\}'/, "");

	let list: any[];
	try {
		list = JSON.parse(cleanData);
	} catch {
		return [];
	}

	// Optimized single-pass reduction
	return list.reduce((acc: GooglePhoto[], item: any[]) => {
		if (item?.[1] !== RPCID) return acc;

		try {
			const responseText = item?.[2];
			if (!responseText) return acc;

			const jsonObj = JSON.parse(responseText);
			const photoData = jsonObj?.[0];

			if (!photoData) return acc;

			const [id, description, filename, createdAt, , size, width, height] =
				photoData;
			const mimeType = lookup(filename as string) || "application/octet-stream";

			acc.push({
				id,
				url: "", // Will be populated in extractAlbum
				description,
				filename,
				createdAt,
				size,
				width,
				height,
				mimeType,
			});
		} catch {
			// Silently ignore parsing failures for individual items
		}
		return acc;
	}, []);
};