base64sheets

What

Upload & download base64-encoded data with Google Sheets.

This abomination uses base64 and gspread to post single files to Google Sheets. It can encode pictures,videos, music and more in a highly inefficient way that won't count towards your Google Drive storage. The size limit is determined by Google Sheet's hard cap of 2 million cells, which is ~99 GB of encoded data at 49,500 characters (or bytes) per cell. The ratio of output bytes to input bytes is 4:3 (33% overhead).

Uploading takes forever, but downloading is faster.

Setup

Gspread requires valid Drive API credentials for use in OAuth2. See here.

In base64sheets.py, edit the following value:

json_file = '[your file here].json'

Additionally, you'll need to spoonfeed it a Google Sheet to start off with (via key, which is found in the URL when opening the spreadsheet in a browser), and that blank sheet must be "shared" with the service account you created (so the program can write to it).

You'll need gspread and oauth2client installed.

pip install gspread oauth2client

or

pip install requirements.txt

Usage

To upload:

base64sheets.py put [GSheets key from URL] [Input filename]

This will delete all previously existing content in the target sheet.

To download:

base64sheets.py get [GSheets key from URL] [Output filename]

Example:

base64sheets.py put 1cagGaHFBk5rFjJ6klMRwdVsUvTgslWtg9x8B-rz5C-I "C:\image\image.png"

base64sheets.py get 1cagGaHFBk5rFjJ6klMRwdVsUvTgslWtg9x8B-rz5C-I "C:\image\reassembled_image.png"

Note that Sheets have no idea what format uploaded files actually are, so you'll have to remember what each sheetpost contains.

Quirks

• Uploading is slow. A 5MB file takes roughly ~3 minutes. Download is a lot faster!
• It doesn't support multiple files, but you can use a .rar or .7z archive.
• Google Sheets has a hardcoded character limit of 50,000 per cell. Sheetpost utilizes 49,500 character per cell, just to be safe. You can probably tweak this and gain some more "performance".
• Sheets interprets a cell starting with "=" as a formula. To combat this, Sheetpost prepends every single line with a single quote ('). This is stupid, but it works. The get mode consequently trims out the first single quote per cell when reassembling the file.