IssueTracker

Agreed, you can download photos via the Google Drive API but this hasn't been incorporated into the Photos API yet...

There's already an issue tracking the missing EXIF data here:  https://issuetracker.google.com/111228390

Regarding the file at original quality - this is something that's on our list and will be addressed soon, please stay tuned. I'll update this bug once we have an update to share.

We have just released a new version of the Google Photos Library API that supports now this feature.

You can now use the "d" base URL parameter to download the original photo. See the base URL parameter guide for more details: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/access-media-items#image-base-urls
Thanks for your patience!

See our release notes for further detail: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/support/release-notes#2018-07-31

I've been testing downloading images using the "d" parameter, but the files returned are not the original files that were uploaded. The release note above reads "d download parameter, to download the original image". The link to the developer documentation doesn't say that the "original" image will be downloaded. Please can you confirm if the d parameter should download the original image that was uploaded to the api, or if this behavior has since changed.

I've tested this again, and the file download is a mutated version of the file uploaded to Photos. If I use the web browser and go to photos.google.com, when I "Download" a photo it is byte-for-byte identical to the file I uploaded. If I use the API and attempt to get a copy, with the included "d" base URL, the file is mutated. Both some metadata is missing, as well the photo itself is modified (doing a pixel-for-pixel comparison shows subtle differences).

I can confirm this is still broken and using the 'd' parameter does not return the original photo.

This is still an issue

How is it marked as fixed? =d parameter still doesn't work