I have some previous experience with the youtube and youtube analytics api where there was an option to use https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/ to essentially create an offline situation for your own user account api access. By creating the key in the developer console you could add that to a custom oAuth credentials. The user account you were logged into would then generate the access token and refresh token needed. I do not see Google Photos API listed as an option here. I would prefer not to create a website just to get a prompt once (myself).
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
If you are specifically after a token to make your own requests to the API, you can still use the OAuth 2.0 playground. You can enter your own scope in the tool under step 1, just below the list of scopes on the left side. (The text box is labelled "Input your own scopes".)
Here you can manually enter a scope that's listed on the "Authentication and authorization scopes" page in the Google Photos Library API developer documentation.
In step 2, you can access a refresh and access tokens and construct your own request in step 3. Note that you won't be able to List possible operations for this API.
Note that you can also specify your own OAuth client ID and client secret from your own Google developers project. You can find this under the "settings" icon on the right, under "Use your own OAuth credentials". Otherwise, tokens are automatically revoked by the playground after a certain amount of time.
However - If you just want to explore the API through the playground, you can use the version that's embedded in the reference documentation. You can find it on each page for a method, for example mediaItems.list. This version includes support for all API methods and makes it easy to construct correct API requests.
