picasaweb album size and density

I was getting pretty close to my 1 gig limit in my picasaweb album and I'm too stingy to buy more storage from Google. So I needed to work out which albums to trim down or remove. When I started using picasaweb I would upload the highest quality pictures and later on I went for fastest upload (lower quality/filesize) so I knew I couldn't count on the number of pictures in the album alone. Picasaweb does show you the size of the album, but only on each album's page so that would take a long time to work out. So I fired up the picasaweb gdata api and got some data, it was super easy to do. I used my bookmarks.py script to do the authentication (which I still don't really understand) and then got the XML for all my albums. Then I collected data and sorted them and displayed them in worst offender order.

The only really niggly point was that the XML used namespaces and I was using ElementTree to parse the XML and findall required some weird arguments to find the elements. A Bit of trial and error and skimming the ElementTree docs I found the solution to that problem. Then I polished up my turd and here it is:

albumsize.py

You can run it with just an picasaweb username (with --user) and it will show you all the public albums. provide a google account address (with --email) and it will prompt you for a password and log in and show you all albums.

It will then print out your albums in worst to least offenders
Each line lists the following data:

• album name
• pics: the number of pictures
• size: the size of the album (possibly in KB?)
• density: how many pictures per MB
• size#: position of this album in the albums if they were ordered by size
• density#: position of this album in the albums if they were ordered by density
• target: sum of size and density (results are ordered on this column)

When I was first writing this I thought I could turn this into a nice web service for y'all. I could make my script really simple and have it return the data via JSON and then process it in a nice HTML table that you could sort the columns on. I could even make links to the albums (including auth keys). But then why not just send the XML back and just make my script a proxy for fetching picasaweb api XML. And then I'd have to parse the XML in JavaScript and I kinda already had everything wanted (in lovely Python) so I kinda gave up on that idea as not interesting enough.