Numbering Weeks from UTC-Zero Vs. Your Birthday
I'm trying to decide the best way to break up my Google Photos querying project into chunks of time. Should I use weeks measured from Unix Timestamp or from my own birthday? I'm now considering writing my own code, as I'm losing faith in the code I was given from ChatGPT. Read more to find out how I'm tackling this project.
Deciding the Best Way to Chunk Time for a Google Photos Querying Project
By Michael Levin
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
February 1st, wow! Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking into the future.
It’s funny that the mental block I’m stuck on with my Python Jupyter work is how to chunk time for Google Photos querying purposes. I am fairly set on measuring time in weeks so that the chunking can let you process a week at a time, tagging and deduping your Google Photos. A week seems just about right. A day, even though the database keys would be more obvious as you can use exact date, would make the task look too huge because each database key will probably also manifest as a directory. A directory of photos for every day is too many to click into, do your thing, back out and move to the next day. And chunking photos based on months would be too many pictures per folder. Week it is. But from where to begin numbering?
Does everyone number their weeks differently based on their birthday? Or does everyone start numbering week 1 from Unix Timestamp. What is Unix Timestamp time?
Unix Timestamp is a format for representing time and date as a single number, which represents the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC.
It was introduced as a standard way of representing time across different systems and programming languages, as it provides a single point of reference for time and date. The Unix Timestamp starts on January 1st, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC, which is the “epoch”.
The day of the week for the start of the Unix Timestamp was Thursday.
The fact that UTC starts on a Thursday is interesting. Week 1 will not be an exact week whether we choose that as universal start time or a birthday. Let’s write the code so that it could work either way.
Put your best foot forward and finish that tweet that’s stuck in draft.
Wow, I may be getting some good advice from ChatGPT:
import os
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
def create_album(album_name):
# Authenticate the user
credentials = Credentials.from_authorized_user_file(os.environ['CREDENTIALS_FILE'])
# Build the Google Photos Library API client
service = build('photoslibrary', 'v1', credentials=credentials)
# Create the album metadata
album_metadata = {'album': {'albumType': 'album', 'productUrl': '', 'isWriteable': True, 'albumMetadata': {'albumTitle': {'text': album_name}}}}
# Call the API to create the album
album = service.albums().create(body=album_metadata).execute()
return album
def add_photos_to_album(album_id, media_item_ids):
# Authenticate the user
credentials = Credentials.from_authorized_user_file(os.environ['CRENTIALS_FILE'])
# Build the Google Photos Library API client
service = build('photoslibrary', 'v1', credentials=credentials)
# Call the API to add the media items to the album
service.mediaItems().batchAdd(albumId=album_id, body={'mediaItemIds': media_item_ids}).execute()
I’m having less and less confidence with the code ChatGPT gives me. When it doesn’t work I have to debug somebody else’s code. When I cobble it together from API documentation, it might not work right away, but at least I’m debugging my own code, based on more recent documentation to boot!