Awesome Tips about Chrome Series
Keyboard shortcuts for Google Drive
Use keyboard shortcuts, we can avoid to use right click menu or trackpad, check here for why and how to use more keyboard, use less trackpad
| Display keyboard shortcuts list | Command+/ |
| Search your Drive | / |
| Rename selected item | n |
| Move selected items to new folder | z |
| Add selected items to an additional folder | Shift + z |
| Share selected item | Period |
| Star or unstar selected items | s |
| Delete selected items | # |
| More actions(right click context) menu | a |
| Current folder actions menu | f |
| Open Create menu | c |
| Show or hide details pane | d |
| Show or hide activity pane | i |
| Select or deselect item | x |
Search Tips and Tricks for Google Drive
More Search Tools
Type “/” to go to search bar, you can find “More search tools” at the bottom. You can specify file type, owner, location, date modified, etc.
Search Syntax
- creator: Find documents in a Team Drive created by a specific person
- owner:: Find documents owned or shared by a specific person.
- to:: Find documents you shared with a specific person or a group.
- Common search syntax: OR, AND, -, “phrase”
- title: - search only the documents that include that specific keyword in their title
- is:trashed - find files in trash folder
Search by Owner
- find files owned by this user: type user’s email first(Google Drive can auto autocomplete the gmail name), then add “owner:” prefix.
- owner:me: files owned by me
- -owner:me: files shared with me, owner not me.
Find shared files
- to: find all the files shared with that
- with: show files shared by that user
Search by Type
- type:pdf, spreadsheet, presentation, image, video, audio
- For other types, we need use MIME types:
- type:application/msword, type:application/vnd.ms-excel, type:application/zip, type:image/jpeg
- before:YYYY-MM-DD after:YYYY-MM-DD
Search in a folder
- Search and go to that folder, then click the folder at the top(or type f for show folder action menus), then click “Search with the folder_name”.
Manage Storage: Use Less Space to Store More Files
- Open settings(shortcut: t), click the View items taking up storage to find out what files are using most spaces.
- or access drive.google.com/drive/quota directly
- Caveat: the files in trash would not shown in the here.
Delete Files from Trash Folder
When we delete a file in Google Drive, it will be put into trash folder and thus still take your space.
When you are out of space, you can try to delete files from trash or empty trash folder. Be sure to know what you you are doing, as if we delete them from trash folder, they would be gone forever.
Check Whether a File Use Storage or Not
Google Drive may or may not use storage limit for files like videos: if we backup them with high quality option, it will not use storage.
To check whether a file uses storage or not, open the details vide by shortcut: ‘d’ or click More Actions at the top menu bar and choose View Details,
Backup Files using Backup and Sync App with High Quality
- If you don’t mind the reduced quality, when backup, choose “High Quality” for Free unlimited storage for videos and photos.
- This “High Quality” option only works for backup, NOT sync: it means videos, photos you synced using the App would still use original quality and thus use storage.
- Files you upload to drive would still use original format, thus use storage limit. Don’t upload big video or images files directly using the web to drive, use the Backup and Sync App
- To keep files with original quality, we can zip these files and store them into another Google drive account.
- We can add the files in backup to other folders: go to Computers side bar in Drive, choose the file then click Add to My Drive in the context menu.
Transfer Files to Others
Files that shared with you would not count as against your quota. You can transfer these big files into another account.
We can only transfer ownership of Google files like Google Docs/Sheets/Slides etc.
To transfer videos to another account
- Share the file with another account
- Collaborator makes a copy of the file and share it with the original account
- In the original account, delete the original file permanently and move the shared file into appropriate folder.
Sync folders using Backup and Sync App
- We can specify what Folders in Google Drive would be synced to local laptop.
Organize Files/Folders
There are many ways to add files into Google Drive - Choose Save to Google at print dialog - in iPhone, use its share function to copy the file to Drive.
Raw Files in Root Folder
Be aware that files(like pdf, videos) including those created in future in the root(/) folder would be also synced into local laptop.
Google should improve this
Put files into right folders
Be sure to rename the file to a better name and put it into right folder.
We may not be able to put files in the right folder when we are saving it to Google Drive for example during print. But be sure to go to Drive to rename and move it: the newly added files will be shown at Quick Access section or check the recent tab at right side.
Share Files on the Web
Embedding a PDF From Drive into a Blog
<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?srcid=[file id]&pid=explorer&efh=false&a=v
&chrome=false&embedded=true" width="580px" height="480px"></iframe>[Embedding a DPF from internet into a Blog]
<iframe src="https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=the_url&embedded=true"
allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>Embed Images from Google Drive into Website
- Get a shareable link from the image in Google drive and replace the id
https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id={fileId} - This link seems to be subject to quotas. So not ideal for public/massive sharing.
More Tips about Google Drive
- Pull out text from images by opening it with google docs
- Use Grammarly in Google Docs for fixing spelling and grammar error.
- Ctrl+Shift+F to toggle compact mode in Google Docs.
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