Google Photos
Google Photos is a cloud-based photo storage and organization service offering automatic backups, AI-assisted search, and shared albums for personal and collaborative media management
Verdict
Common use cases
- Pull brand assets into campaign briefs
- Archive event photos to shared albums
- Fetch product shots for social posts
- Download customer screenshots for support tickets
- Organize design files into project albums
Integration
- Vendor
- Google Photos
- Category
- developer-tools
- Auth
- OAUTH2
- Tools
- 13
- Composio slug
googlephotos
Tools
- Add Enrichment
Adds an enrichment at a specified position in a defined album.
- Batch Add Media Items
Adds one or more media items to an album in google photos.
- Batch Create Media Items
Unified action to upload media files and create them as items in google photos.
- Batch Get Media Items
Returns the list of media items for the specified media item identifiers.
- Create Album
Creates a new album in google photos.
- Download Photos Media Item
Downloads a media item from google photos and returns it as a file.
- Get Album
Returns the album based on the specified albumid.
- List Albums
Lists all albums shown to a user in the albums tab of google photos.
- List Media Items
Lists all media items from a user's google photos library.
- Search Media Items
Searches for media items in a user's google photos library.
- Update Album
Updates an album's title or cover photo in google photos.
- Update Media Item
Updates a media item's description in google photos.
- Upload Media
Upload a media file to google photos. supports images (up to 200mb) and videos (up to 20gb).
Setup
Setup guide
- 11. Open your Switchy workspace settings and navigate to the Integrations page. 2. Find Google Photos in the MCP directory and click Connect. 3. You'll be redirected to Google's OAuth consent screen—sign in with the Google account that owns the photo library you want to access. 4. Grant the requested scopes: photoslibrary (read/write access to albums and media items) and photoslibrary.sharing (access to shared albums). 5. After approving, you'll return to Switchy and see a green checkmark next to Google Photos. 6. Open any Space, type '@Google Photos list albums', and send—if you see a list of album names, the connection works. 7. To test uploads, try '@Google Photos create album' with a title, then batch-upload a file using the batch create media items tool.
What teammates see: by default, memories from Google Photos are scoped to the Space (PROJECT visibility) - you can mark any memory PRIVATE or share it ORG-wide.
Works well with
Top models
Compatibility data appears once enough Spaces have used this MCP together with a given model.
How Switchy teams use it
Starter prompts
List All Albums
@Google Photos list all albums in my library and show me the album titles with their IDs.Open in a Space →
Create Campaign Album
@Google Photos create a new album called 'Q2 Product Launch' and return the album ID so I can add photos to it.Open in a Space →
Fetch Specific Photos
@Google Photos batch get the media items with IDs [paste IDs here] and show me their base URLs.Open in a Space →
Download Hero Image
@Google Photos download the media item with ID [paste ID] and attach it to this Space as a file.Open in a Space →
Batch Upload Screenshots
@Google Photos batch create media items from these three files [attach files] and add them to the album 'Support Screenshots'.Open in a Space →
Example outputs
Illustrative - representative of the model's voice and quality, not literal recordings.
@Google Photos list all albums created in the last 6 months and show me which ones have more than 50 photos
Found 4 albums created since June 2024: 1. **Summer Road Trip** (127 photos) — Created July 15 2. **Office Renovation** (89 photos) — Created August 3 3. **Weekend Hikes** (62 photos) — Created September 10 4. **Client Demos** (31 photos) — Created October 5 Three albums exceed 50 photos. The MCP retrieved album metadata including creation dates and item counts, then filtered by your date range.
This example shows the list-albums tool paired with AI reasoning to filter results. The MCP returns album metadata but doesn't fetch individual photo details unless explicitly requested. Requires read-only Photos Library API scope. Large libraries may hit pagination limits; the AI will summarize what it retrieves.
@Google Photos create a new album called 'Q4 Marketing Assets' and add the 8 product photos I uploaded yesterday
Created album **Q4 Marketing Assets** (album ID: `AEnB2Up...`). Added 8 media items: - `product_hero_01.jpg` through `product_hero_08.jpg` All items now appear in the album. Note: The MCP identified yesterday's uploads by matching your description to recent media item timestamps. If multiple batches were uploaded yesterday, confirm the correct set before running this.
Demonstrates create-album and batch-add-media-items in sequence. The MCP can create albums and populate them, but identifying 'yesterday's uploads' requires the AI to query media items by date first. This is a write operation—once executed, the album exists in your Google Photos account. Requires full Photos Library API scope.
@Google Photos download the 5 highest-resolution photos from my 'Product Launch 2024' album and summarize their EXIF metadata
Downloaded 5 photos (total 47 MB): 1. `DSC_9821.jpg` — 6000×4000px, Canon EOS R5, f/2.8, 1/250s, ISO 400 2. `DSC_9834.jpg` — 6000×4000px, Canon EOS R5, f/2.8, 1/320s, ISO 320 3. `IMG_1203.jpg` — 4032×3024px, iPhone 14 Pro, f/1.78, 1/120s, ISO 64 4. `DSC_9847.jpg` — 6000×4000px, Canon EOS R5, f/4.0, 1/500s, ISO 200 5. `DSC_9856.jpg` — 6000×4000px, Canon EOS R5, f/2.8, 1/200s, ISO 500 Most shots taken with Canon R5 at f/2.8. iPhone photo has lower resolution but competitive sharpness.
Combines download-photos-media-item with AI analysis of file metadata. The MCP retrieves full-resolution files, which can be large—budget for bandwidth and storage. EXIF parsing happens client-side after download. Requires read-only scope. Rate limits apply to bulk downloads; downloading 50+ photos in one prompt may throttle.
Use-case deep-dives
When Google Photos beats a file-tree for support assets
A 6-person customer success team logs 40+ support tickets a week, each needing annotated screenshots of product flows. They used to dump PNGs into Dropbox folders named by month, but search was a nightmare and duplicates piled up. The Google Photos MCP lets them batch-upload screenshots from Slack threads, auto-create albums per product area, and pull exact images into help docs by media ID. The album-list and batch-get tools make it trivial to surface the right asset in under 10 seconds. This breaks down if your team generates more than 200 images a day—Google Photos' free tier caps storage, and the MCP doesn't expose advanced search filters. But for teams under 10 people sharing visual assets across support, onboarding, or QA, this is the fastest way to centralize images without building a DAM.
Why this MCP works for async design reviews
A 4-person product team runs design critiques in Slack once a week. Designers drop mockups into a shared Google Photos album using batch-create, tag the album with the feature name, and engineers pull the latest versions into Linear tickets via the download tool. The OAuth2 flow means no API keys to rotate, and the 13 tools cover the full upload-organize-retrieve loop. The win here is speed: designers don't context-switch to Figma exports, and engineers get pixel-perfect PNGs without asking for links. This falls apart if your design system lives in Figma with components—Google Photos has no layer metadata or version history. But for small teams shipping web or mobile features where static mockups are enough, this MCP cuts handoff time from hours to minutes.
When batch-upload beats manual album curation
A 3-person marketing team runs quarterly user meetups and collects 100+ photos per event from attendees via a shared Google Form. They used to manually drag images into Google Photos albums, then export for blog posts. The batch-create and add-enrichment tools let them script the entire flow: upload all submissions to a timestamped album, add captions from form responses, and pull hero images into their CMS by album ID. The list-albums tool makes it easy to surface past events for anniversary posts. This setup saves 2 hours per event. It's overkill if you only run one event a year, and it doesn't handle video well—Google Photos' video API is limited. But for teams running recurring events with photo-heavy content needs, this MCP turns album management into a one-click task.
Frequently asked
What does the Google Photos MCP do in Switchy?
It lets your AI agents create albums, upload photos, batch-add media items, and download images from Google Photos. You can also list albums, fetch specific media items by ID, and add enrichments like text or location data to albums. Think of it as programmatic access to your team's photo library, controlled by natural language prompts.
Do I need admin access to connect Google Photos?
No. Any Google account with a Photos library can authenticate via OAuth2. The MCP requests scopes to read and write your albums and media items, but you don't need workspace admin rights. Whoever connects it grants access to their personal Google Photos account, not a shared org library.
Can the MCP edit or delete existing photos?
No. The tools focus on creating albums, uploading new media, and organizing items into albums. You can download a photo as a file, but you can't modify metadata, apply filters, or delete images through this MCP. For edits, use the Google Photos app directly.
Why use this instead of the Google Photos web app?
The MCP shines when you need to automate repetitive tasks—like batch-uploading event photos, creating albums from a list of filenames, or pulling images into a workflow that combines data from other MCPs. If you're just browsing or sharing one album, the web app is faster.
Who on the team should connect Google Photos?
Whoever owns the photo library you want agents to access. If your team stores event photos in one person's account, that person connects it. Each connection is scoped to a single Google account, so you can't share access across multiple users' libraries without multiple connections.