Retrieve hotel images

In this tutorial we will show you how you can get images for hotels to integrate them your Python hotel application.

For that we will use the Place Photos API in conjuction with the Text Search and Place Details APIs.

The flow is the following:

• Call the Text Search API by providing the name of the hotel and its latitude/longitude to get its place_id. This API also provides a single photo reference per place.
• Call the Place Details API with the place_id as input to get all photo references.
• Call the Place Photos API to download the referenced photos and resize them as needed.

Prerequisites

• Google API key: create an account and get your key at the Google portal
• Python dependences: install the libraries used with the pip install -r requirements.txt command

Code

Let's now see the code. For the example we will look for images for the HOTEL VILLA PANTHEON at the location 48.84917,2.34615. In your application you can get both the hotel name and the location using the Hotel List API.

import requests
import json

# Text Search API
def get_place_id(google_key, headers):
    hotel_name = 'HOTEL VILLA PANTHEON'
    lat_lng = '48.84917,2.34615'
    base_url = 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/textsearch/json'
    params = '?location=' + lat_lng + '&query=' + hotel_name + '&radius=10&key=' + google_key
    url = base_url + params

    response = requests.request('GET', url, headers=headers, data={})
    json_response = json.loads(response.text)
    place_id = json_response['results'][0]['place_id']
    return place_id

# Place Details API
def place_details(google_key, headers, place_id): 
    url = 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/details/json?place_id=' + place_id + '&key=' + google_key

    response = requests.request('GET', url, headers=headers, data={})
    json_response = json.loads(response.text)

    photo_references = []
    for i in range(len(json_response['result']['photos'])):
        photo_references.append(json_response['result']['photos'][i]['photo_reference']
    )
    return photo_references

# Place Photos API 
def place_photos(google_key, photo_reference): 
    url = 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/place/photo?photo_reference=' + photo_reference + '&key=' + google_key

    headers = {
    'Accept': 'image/*'
    }

    response = requests.request('GET', url, headers=headers, data={})
    print(response)

def main():
    google_key = 'GOOGLE_API_KEY'
    headers = { 'Accept': 'application/json'
            }
    place_id = get_place_id(google_key, headers)
    photo_references = place_details(google_key, headers, place_id)
    photos = place_photos(google_key, photo_references[0])

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

There are 3 functions in the code that represent the flow that we have described:

get_place_id: it calls the Text Search API to search for a hotel with the name HOTEL VILLA PANTHEON located at the latitude and longitude of 48.84917,2.34615. For the API call we pass the Google API key, headers, and search parameters. The response is then parsed into a JSON object, and the place_id of the first result is returned.

place_details: it calls the Place Details API to retrieve details about the hotel with the given place_id. A list of photo references is returned.

place_photo: this function uses the Place Photos API to retrieve a photo of the hotel using the given photo reference. For this example we pass the first photo reference, but the API can be called for all the references you get.