Restrict gScreen to specific albums

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gScreen creates slideshows across your entire Google Photos library by default, but you can limit it to specific albums using the --album-ids flag:

❯ gscreen start \
    --data-dir "<local database path>" \
    --album-ids "<comma-separated album IDs>"

You can determine the album ID for a given album using the albums list subcommand:

❯ gscreen albums list --data-dir "<local database path>"
Albums for account1@example.com:
+----------------------------------------------+------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                    ALBUM                     | SIZE |                                                 ID                           |
+----------------------------------------------+------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Vacation 2022                                |   44 | AEVf-TjjtwKd99zCnrjOtDbzsh4zEQm6WqkN707ZXtg29maXnz8vveyFEqXSdsOawreWnHLnkbDR |
| First Day of School!                         |   26 | AEVf-TgSNF_I0Ot_5vB1g-Bl7zqA6B6q9fFBc1t-9lZrOGYt2bJf0tUfZGfkp8-VN8wohLEI0e7Z |
+----------------------------------------------+------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Albums for account2@example.com:
+----------------------------------------------+------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                    ALBUM                     | SIZE |                                                 ID                           |
+----------------------------------------------+------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Nature & Birdwatching                        |   97 | AEVf-TjpH6BVStAmHK8gIx6oPRCQce1jxOCjd3yRnDUWqBRX9Cef0bLac4JPPh-otHlw507cIZng |
+----------------------------------------------+------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

gScreen figures out which account each album belongs to and only serves slideshows from those albums. You can even start multiple instances of gScreen — each with a different set of albums — for different sets of viewers.

Note

This feature is in beta. Known limitations:

Once gScreen has indexed an album, items that are removed from that album on Google Photos are not reflected in gScreen's index.
Shared albums can sometimes fail to be indexed.

Next: Running gScreen in the cloud