A request for opinions — Over the holidays, I downloaded all my gmail in preparation to analyze them using LLMs, to see if I could make it easier for me to respond to emails. In the past, I’ve used the Google Java libraries to access Sheets and Drive (copying the work of https://github.com/pvgomes/clojure-google-sheets and https://github.com/SparkFund/google-apps-clj), as well as Google Cloud Storage. So I used the Gmail libraries — I was a little surprised at how strange and difficult I found it to use. • side-effecting calls to Gmail happened at surprising times (you fetch a list of Gmail threads, and then when you iterate over each thread, it calls Gmail APIs behind the scenes again for each thread). • everything return object seems to be a different type of object in a vast object hierarchy, requiring lots of digging around and trial-and-error to figure out what to do with them — I often just called (bean object) , but still had to dig through the Java method, searching for the name of getters to actually retrieve the underlying string (e.g. “email sender”). Earlier this week, I decided to start a project to use LLMs to go through my Google Photos to find all screenshots of my podcast player, to retrieve the current playtime, so I can go back and find out what I thought was so interesting at the time. (When listening to a podcast, when I hear something interesting, I take a screenshot, in the hopes of going back sometime and doing something.) I found the Google Photos Java client to be even worse, to the point of being outright frustrating — I’m wading through objects like SearchMediaItemsPagedResponse, SearchMediaItemsPage, MediaItem, MiediaItemMetadata. (Building search filters was even worse, because you needed to call builders for each type of search parameter.) This was jarring to me, because I had used the REST API for Google Photos years before, and you just passed search filters as a string, and got back a nice JSON data structure, which is very easy to parse. After pondering this overnight, I think I will abandon using the Google Photos Java client, and instead use the REST API. (I will keep all the code to do the OAuth authentication, and I figured out how to generate an access token from the refresh-token.) My question: I’ve heard many people complain about having to deal with Java objects, getters, setters, etc. But this is the first time I’ve found it genuinely frustrating — to escape from it, I took two hours to learn more about the different types of OAuth tokens, generate that access token, so I could just use an HTTP client instead. How common is this situation in the Java environments? I found the Java clients for Drive, Gmail were bearable. Google Jib and Cloud Storage library were easy. But Photos to be nearly unusable (i.e., “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.). Are there ways to easily tell which Java libraries have this characteristic? And maybe more concretely — how have people’s experiences been using the Google Java libraries?] Thank you in advance!