How to connect Google Photos to Hermes Agent

Pairing is a two-step handshake: run hermes clawlink begin, approve the link in your browser, then run hermes clawlink finish. If you ran finish before approving, or the approval link expired, run hermes clawlink begin again to get a fresh link. Confirm the plugin was installed with --enable, then verify with hermes clawlink test.

Reconnect Google Photos from the dashboard, then start a fresh chat if the runtime still has the old tool catalog loaded.

Google Photos tool schemas load on demand the first time a tool runs and are cached after that, so this error usually clears on its own: wait a few seconds and retry the same request. If every Google Photos call keeps failing with it in a fresh chat, reconnect from the dashboard, and contact support if it still persists — that pattern points to a configuration problem on our side, not something you can fix by reconnecting again.

Two usual causes. The connected account may not have access to the specific workspace, inbox, store, or project in the request — check that first. If access looks right, the agent may have sent a placeholder value (like "YOUR_ID" or an example id from documentation) instead of a real one: ask it to run a list or search tool first, then retry the action with a real id from those results. Most failures at this stage are one of these two, not ClawLink bugs.

In almost every case this is the March 2025 scope change rather than a broken connection, and the empty-list version is the more confusing symptom because nothing errors. The Library API now serves only content the application created, so listing or searching returns nothing for photos you took on your phone, and calls that relied on the removed photoslibrary or photoslibrary.readonly scopes return PERMISSION_DENIED. No amount of reconnecting changes this, because the scope that would grant it no longer exists. If the goal is to work with photos the agent itself uploaded, check that the upload and the read are happening on the same connection. If the goal is to reach your existing library, the honest answer is that the Library API cannot, and Google's Picker API is the supported route.

Ask the agent to diagnose it:

List the albums you can see with googlephotos_list_albums, then tell me whether any of them were created by this integration. Do not assume an empty result means the connection is broken.

Album membership is a separate call from the upload. googlephotos_batch_add_media_items adds existing media to an album, so an agent that uploads and then reports success may have created the media without ever attaching it. The second cause is album ownership: the tools can add to albums the application created, and an album you made yourself in the Google Photos app is not one of those, so the add silently has nothing to attach to. Ask the agent to create the album through googlephotos_list_albums and the album tools, then add items to that album id.

Ask the agent to diagnose it:

Show me the album id you used and confirm whether that album was created through this integration. Then list what googlephotos_batch_get_media_items returns for the items you uploaded.

If this is an integration you built yourself, the date to check is 31 March 2025: code written against photoslibrary.readonly or photoslibrary stopped working then, and the fix is not re-authenticating but changing what the app asks for and accepting the narrower app-created scope. On a ClawLink connection the scope set is already the current one, so a sudden failure across every call means the grant was revoked — reconnect from the dashboard. A failure on only some calls is more likely the app-created boundary showing up on the reads rather than the writes.

Try reconnecting Google Photos and complete the consent flow in the same browser session. Partial OAuth approvals or switching accounts mid-flow can leave the connection incomplete.

Yes. ClawLink is the fastest way to connect Hermes to Google Photos: link your Google Photos account once in the browser and Hermes Agent can call the Google Photos API through 10 ready-made tools — no custom code or token handling.

Install the plugin with hermes plugins install ClawLink-HQ/hermes-plugin --enable, then pair once: run hermes clawlink begin, approve the link in your browser, and run hermes clawlink finish. Connect Google Photos in the dashboard and Hermes can use it from the next message — no config files or API keys to manage.

About two minutes. Sign in, click Connect next to Google Photos in the dashboard, authenticate, and Hermes Agent can use it from the next chat message.

The alternative to ClawLink is usually manual OAuth app setup plus your own token handling, permission troubleshooting, and tool plumbing for Hermes Agent. That is fine if you want to build and maintain the integration yourself. Most teams just want Google Photos working from chat.

No, and this is a Google restriction rather than a ClawLink one. On 31 March 2025 Google removed the photoslibrary, photoslibrary.readonly, and photoslibrary.sharing scopes and refocused the Library API on app-created content, so listing and searching now run under a scope that only returns media the connected application uploaded or created. Any tool or service claiming an agent can search your full library through the Library API is describing how it worked before that change. Google's answer for whole-library selection is the separate Picker API, which asks the person to choose photos themselves rather than granting programmatic access.

More than it sounds. It can upload media and add it to albums, create and update albums, add enrichments like text and location markers at specific positions, read back the items it created, and download a media item as a file. That covers the workflows people actually automate — generating or collecting images and organising them into an album with captions — and it is exactly the shape Google intends the Library API to serve now. What it does not cover is treating Photos as a searchable archive of everything you have ever taken.

No. Building this yourself means creating a project, enabling the Photos Library API, configuring an OAuth consent screen, and taking it through verification because the Photos scopes are sensitive. ClawLink connects through an already-registered app, so the only screen you see is Google's consent screen. That removes the setup work; it does not change the API's limits, which apply the same way to every application including your own.

No. Google removed the sharing methods entirely in the same 2025 change — albums.share, albums.unshare, and the shared-album endpoints are no longer available, and there is no scope that restores them. If your workflow ends with people seeing an album, have the agent build it and then share it yourself from the Google Photos app, which is the path Google now points to.

Pairing is a two-step handshake: run hermes clawlink begin, approve the link in your browser, then run hermes clawlink finish. If you ran finish before approving, or the approval link expired, run hermes clawlink begin again to get a fresh link. Confirm the plugin was installed with --enable, then verify with hermes clawlink test.