Google Photos Album Selector 🎚️

Google album IDs are opaque strings - long, ugly, and impossible to remember. This node exists so you never have to paste one by hand. It turns your album list into a dropdown, and when you pick one, it hands the album's ID to the Album Loader. That's the whole job, and it does it cleanly. The one thing that trips people up is where the dropdown comes from.

How it works

The Selector reads a file called albums_list.json from the pack's folder and builds its dropdown from it, with each option formatted as index | title | count. When you run it, it parses the index back out and looks up the corresponding album ID, emitting it as a STRING (album_id).

And here's the gotcha: that JSON is written by the Album Lister. The two nodes don't connect with a wire - the Lister writes the file, the Selector reads it. If you've never run the Lister, or you've added albums since, the Selector's dropdown is empty or stale. In ComfyUI, where everything else communicates over visible connections, this hidden file handoff is easy to miss. Run the Lister first. Re-run it when your albums change.

The inputs and output

One input:

• selected_album (enum) - the dropdown itself. It has no static choices; it's populated at load time from albums_list.json.

One output:

• album_id (STRING) - wire this into the Album Loader's album_id input and you're done.

That's the whole node. There's no client_secrets input here - the Selector never touches the network; it's pure local file → dropdown → ID. If the Lister did the auth properly, this node needs nothing.

How to install it

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/lazniak/comfyui-google-photos-loader.git
pip install -r requirements.txt
# restart ComfyUI

Or ComfyUI Manager → "Google Photos Loader" (by PabloGFX) → Install → restart. No model downloads. You still need the pack's Google auth set up, because the Lister feeding this node needs it - the Login/Logout article covers that one-time setup.

Troubleshooting

• Empty dropdown → albums_list.json doesn't exist; run the Album Lister once.
• Dropdown shows old albums only → re-run the Lister; it overwrites the JSON each time.
• Dropdown is correct but the Album Loader finds nothing → the stored ID is stale (album deleted or moved). Re-run the Lister to refresh.
• Changing albums doesn't immediately update the dropdown → ComfyUI builds the widget's choices when the node's inputs are evaluated; re-queue the workflow or reload the graph if it looks stuck on the old list.